How should I classify a wild animal brought to a rehabber?

My friends and I recently brought a young Gray Fox to a rehabber. I brought my recording gear, because it had made some sounds when it was originally found, and I was able to get some recordings. The rehabber is a few miles away from where the animal was originally found. Should I mark this animal as captive, even though it is a wild animal and will eventually be released? Should I use the location where it was found, even though I made the recording somewhere else (I’m thinking not, since the animal is probably going to be released near where it was recorded)?

In general, I think people are fine with marking something as wild even when captive so long as the observation has the wild location and the wild date. If you use the rehabber location, you should mark captive because it was brought there by humans.
It’s also helpful to include in the description the reason why you consider it wild (i.e. you’ve filled in the wild data), and maybe even preemptively vote it wild.

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yeah, best is to mark when and where you found it. This comes up often with herbarium records, bug collections, etc, though hopefully the fox fares better than pinned bugs.

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marking something as “captive” is generally for things like pets, not a wild animal you caught. and the best thing would be to mark the observation where you found the animal, the location where you recorded it really doesnt matter all that much.

a similar-ish example for you would be yesterday, i found some roadkill, made an observation, and then took it home. my sister then found ticks on said roadkill. i took pictures of the ticks and added them as observations. even though i only saw the ticks at home, they came from the roadkill so i put their location as the same as the initial roadkill observation, as that is where they actually were initially, and it would not be accurate or helpful to put them as found at my home because they weren’t actually from there.

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Thanks everyone! I’ll make sure to include the history of the individual, since I know when and where it was found, and mark it as not captive.

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and note that if you added it using the app or a georeferenced photo you will need to manually edit the location to where you found it.

If I am understanding the situation properly, I think I personally would upload the recordings for the time and location where they were recorded and mark it captive, because the recordings were made in the context of the rehab which might affect how it behaves and sounds. Then I would make another observation without any media for the initial encounter, and in the description or an observation field link to the observation with the recording.

I guess it depends whether you see the recording as evidence of that species (for which it can be evidence of it occurring somewhere else since you have noted the history) or as an observation to help learn about the species (in which case the specific context is important).
Like in the tick example I see it as evidence that the tick was on the roadkill, and the photo is just to prove that it is a tick. But if I took a wild plant indoors and kept it alive and made observations of it, at some point it would stop being representative of the way it was in the wild but might still be worth making observations of for one reason or another to learn about that plant species. Not sure if that makes sense…

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