Other species heard in the calls of mockingbirds and other mimics

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@kiwifergus

Take the situation where there is a species list maintained by the park authority of birds seen at a local park… that shows that other people have seen those birds, and indirectly I can infer that they are present at that park even if I can’t see them myself. This I think obviously doesn’t fit the iNat concept of “observation”, even if we factor in that I “observed the list”!

i think this gets most directly to what i’m getting at with my mockingbird example. it seems the line that is crossed here is that it’s technically a secondhand account – through an intermediary, not just indirect evidence. so even if the mockingbird call could be trusted to be mimicking a bird that was in the area recently, i think the spirit of iNaturalist says that i still need to make my own observation of that other bird.

@er1kksen

maybe this is something better for an observation field like “Call mimicking species _,” or something like that

is there a way to use a single observation field multiple times in a given observation? most of the mockingbirds here seem to mimic multiple other birds. so ideally if i were to go with an observation field approach to capture this information, i’d like to be able to catalog all of the other bird species in a single searchable observation field.