Hi! I ID’d three birds today using binoculars that I know my no-zoom iPhone photos can’t prove… I wrote my binocular observations in the photos’ descriptions. These observations are sitting in limbo, whereas other observations were corroborated quickly.
Q1. Will Identifiers take my notes into account when confirming my IDs?
Q2. If no, how do I mark these as personal / casual so nobody wastes their time saying “I only see proof that you observed a Duck, not that it’s a Mallard duck”?
You can always upload observations without photos at all. That way they won’t show up as “Needs ID”. If you do want to keep the photos, you could mark the observation as not having evidence of organism in the Data Quality Assessment section (though it wouldn’t strictly be true). There’s no perfect solution really.
It makes sense for lower quality photos to take longer to be confirmed, but with birds people are often able to identify what’s there even from bad photos. It may just take longer for more skilled or confident people to see it.
If you don’t include photos they will automatically be casual as bouteloua said. But if you do include the photos, depending on the situation you could opt out of community ID for that observation and/or mark “No” to the “can the community ID be improved?” question in the DQA.
However, have you considered trying to use your iPhone camera through your binoculars? It can be quite effective, if a bit tedious.
Have you posted them already? It looks like most of your identifications on your observations have been confirmed now.
Thanks for the tip–I didn’t know you could post observations without photos!
Thanks, I was quite impressed with what Identifiers came up with. Even with low-quality photos, they corrected one of my IDs! iPhone + Binoculars… hmm… I’ll give that a shot. I’m definitely feeling a desire for more zoom without carrying around a DSLR.
Thanks for the tip on digi-scoping! Taking pics with my 16x32 bin was difficult, so I got a Nikon 8x25 Trailblazer and now it’s a piece of cake—besides being easier to see birds.
Awesome, no problem!
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