I try to annotate my observations in the hope it might assist looking for something specific which is included in the observation. Seems like the obvious purpose of annotations.
What is accomplished when there is an anonymous “Disagree” checked? Say, images of a bird nest with nestling, and someone disagrees that there is a Construction and a Juvenile… Are they saying that it’s not a great picture, or is the intent to hold that there is no nestling and no nest? Or that the nestling and nest shown are not sufficient for identification to species?
A couple of these just popped up for me. The disagreer is unknown. No comments. Multiple identifiers concur on the ID (there is also an adult present). I’d like to do it right, or not do it at all.
First, thank you so much for annotating, and please keep doing it!
I think if you hover over the annotation, you can see who voted. You could DM them and ask them. More communication is always good!
You could also write a comment under the observation, explaining why you annotated the way you did, and if disputes are frequently occurring, you could write a journal post explaining your approach to annotations, and link back to that journal post in your comments.
Since iNat’s annotation is for ‘construction’ which includes negative space like a burrow or tree hollow (sorry – chipped out of a dead tree by a bird) – I don’t see why an owl nest should not count here.
Except an obs I just found – small nest with feather. And the observer’s intention is – whose feather ?
Best to ask the user who disagreed then, personally, if I am sure that the species of owl concerned only takes over nests and adds nothing to it, then I would vote down.
I’ll post an ob soon of balbyters that took over a disused termite heap, same story - I can be 100% sure that balbyters did not build the heap and that a termite heap in the veld as a construction is not evidence of the existence of balbyters in the area. So that ob will be duplicated for both balbyters and termites - with one as the live organism (balbyters) and one as a construction (termites) as evidence of presence.
As a bird dumbo, that would catch me by surprise, and perhaps others would be the same, I wouldn’t regard a tree hollow itself as a construction, although if it becomes ornamented or padded in various ways inside it would make sense to me to lump it under such a flag if there were nothing more precise.
For your examples I hope either observer or identifier left a comment ?
I was thinking of a hollow chipped out by a bird (which wouldn’t apply to owls) ? An actual construction rather than a convenient fork ?
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/251189478 we had owls nesting in large hanging planters at Kirstenbosch. It is Their Nest. But I guess not a ‘construction’, Presume they lined the nest a bit, but cannot see in.
Apologies if I have left a few rogue annotations, will be more thoughtful in future.
I think one other reason for downvoting here might be that each observation should focus on one individual organism. A constructed nest would not necessarily be evidence for a juvenile owl (which didn’t build it), but for an adult. If the observation is annotated for both, it isn’t clear which individual is the focus.
There could be a similar issue if an observation were to be annotated for a juvenile but also Evidence of Presence “Feather” for a feather from an adult bird, and probably other combinations (Adult and Egg, etc.)
I don’t know if this is what the annotator was thinking, and the situation is uncommon and tending towards splitting hairs (barbules?), but it’s probably best just to leave a polite comment mentioning the annotator to ask them.
Maybe some owls do literally nothing to a nest they take over - I’m not sure - but owl nests I have seen have always had a bit of a depression scooped by the owl, similar to a chicken nest. They might move into a tree hole made by another species, or nest on a stack of haybales in a barn, but they create a depression to keep their eggs from rolling out from under their brood patch. That depression would fit iNat’s definition of “construction” even though it isn’t a very impressive one.
On the other hand, a photo of the entrance to an old woodpecker hole owls are nesting in would not be a construction for the owl.
But maybe we have gotten a little off topic here by focusing on owl nests. Someone downvoted juvenile when there’s a nestling in the photo? I have no idea why they would do that. I think you should definitely @mention them to ask. Starting a discussion in the comments will also help others who see the observation notice the annotation dispute, so they can help overturn it even if the original person doesn’t respond.
Except that “Construction” is just one of several values. The actual annotation is “Evidence of Presence” - there’s no annotation for nests, as such. By itself, a depression isn’t evidence of anything in particular. A nest may provide evidence of the presence of the creature that built it, but not of any other of the species that subsequently occupy it. Perhaps the owls example only seems counter-intuitive because they happen to belong to the same group of animals as the original nest-builder. For the wide variety of other creatures that live exclusively in nests (e.g. coprophagous mites), there’s no contradiction at all. If the aim is to simply record the fact that the observation features a nest, an observation-field would usually be more appropriate than an annotation.
It’s almost certainly because the photos show both juveniles and adults. In which case, the observation should either be duplicated (so that both can be recorded separately), or it should state clearly that the subject is only for the juvenile (or the adult).
Unless they didn’t spot the young bird I wonder, not knowing the matter, if different people use the word ‘juvenile’ slightly differently, either in terms of when it becomes juvenile or when it stops being juvenile. I made a quick ask of Gemini and it mentions for example that field birders and bird-ringers use the term differently.
To me, it looks like the possible reasons for doing the disagreeing are, at best, splitting hairs in a way I don’t find useful. What are annotations for? To help us find observations with the feature annotated. Is the feature visible? OK to annotate it.
The nest is present. Arguing that one should not annotate it because the nestling didn’t construct it is not helping people find observations with nests. It should be annotated as construction, in my opinion, if it’s present in the photo. We can annotate nests that are no longer in use as contructions, so annotating a nest with a nestling as a construction is certainly OK, even though the nestling didn’t build it. Even simple nests are constructions, even if the constructing part is just making a small depression or adding a few feathers. Thus even repurposed crow nests and hay bale tops with eggs and feathers are constructions. Small depressions in the ground that are or will be used as nests are constructions. It’s true that we should NOT identify any odd depressions as a nest unless there is good evidence it is being / will be / was used as nests (eggs, young, a parent incubating, broken egg shells, etc.). I would annotate an old woodpecker hole as a starling nest (construction) if now a baby starling’s head is sticking out of it or it is being visited by an adult carrying food. Such repurposed cavities are almost always modified by the addition of sticks, feathers, snake skins, etc. – constructed.
You could, of course, post the bird and nest as two separate observations. Feels like a waste of resources to me but certainly clear.
I usually annotate photos with both adult and young as “juvenile” because in most cases with birds, juveniles are less often posted than adults. Assuming the baby bird is visible, annotating this as juvenile is OK. It would be wrong to annotate this one observation as both adult and juvenile, but I would be surprised if the program even let you do that. If the adult is conspicuous and the juvenile is hard to see or identify, it’s perfectly OK to annotate this for the juvenile. An observation doesn’t have to be for the most obvious organism in the photo; see this project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/ignore-the-elephant-seal .
What to do about it? A polite discussion with the annotator may help. Also, recruit allies to annotate it the way you think it should be annotated. If they disagree with you, that leads to a useful discussion.
For the most part, owls don’t build their own nests, but re-use ones made by other species. (Even Burrowing Owls usually use other species burrows.) That might be the logic here?
Okay, after looking at your owl nest observations (very cool by the way!) I have to agree that any alterations the owl made to the inside of the nest, such as constructing a depression or adding a few feathers, are not visible in the photos. It’s too bad there isn’t a way to annotate “nest” for birds. Because yes, someone looking for good images of long-eared owl nests would be interested in these, but no, nothing constructed by the owl is visible in the photo even though we know it’s there, out of sight.
I do definitely see at least one owlet (I think part of a second) in the first observation where you spotted them. Your notes indicate the observation was for the nestling(s), and you annotated only as juvenile, not also for the adult, so I see zero reason for controversy there. My best guess is that whoever downvoted simply didn’t see the nestling, and believed you had mistaken the breeding adult for an immature. You could try @mentioning them on the observation and pointing out that you see the adult, but the observation is for the nestling peeking out from behind it’s parent, visible at upper right.
Yes, that could cause confusion for sure! If I’m describing a young bird I saw to birder friends, “juvenile” is a brief phase between “fledgling” and “immature,” when it can fully fly and is starting to forage on it’s own, but usually still receives food from parents. However iNat doesn’t allow for annotating hatchling, nestling, fledgling, juvenile, and immature separately. The choices for birds are “egg” “juvenile” or “adult,” so I think it’s pretty clear “juvenile” is meant to include nestlings here.
I can think of at least three possible explanations here.
There are multiple photos attached to the observation, and some of the photos only show adults. In practice, what this means is that if someone is searching through photos labeled “juvenile”, they’re going to find those photos which don’t show any juveniles, which is annoying. Annotations ideally should apply to all of the photos.
They are incorrectly using “juvenile” in the ornithological sense, which is much more specific than the way iNat uses the annotation. Plenty of birds annotated juvenile on iNat are not juveniles.
They clicked the wrong thing by mistake. (It happens)
tyvm. Thought I tried that among a bunch of other things, but only managed to add a downvote to my own annotation. Just wasn’t doing it right… Now it’s possible for me to contact parties (suddenly there is a whole flurry of votes on that small collection of owl observations).
Boy, I can see a certain logic there, but if that is the kind of philosophical debate going on silently within annotations I don’t think I have the energy for it.
As soon as a parent plops down on an adopted nest, some amount of modification will take place — i.e. construction. And that’s not really my mental construct for a construction annotation, but more a physical modification of the environment associated with the reported organism. By requiring the “construction” to be 100% the effort of the reported organism, there would seem no way to actually use the annotation to discover the constructs adopted or inadvertently modified by this owl, or a starling, or a kestrel, or many nightjars, or the hermit crab… Many constructs can’t be positively associated with their organism, except when also observed — but they remain an important piece of natural history to be noted and shared.
I guess I have learned *how* to take the question up with the disagreer(s). Now to decide how much effort it may be worth if there is no standard practice I can work with…
This is one of the weird iNat constructs I have a hard time getting my head around. If I observe a population of plants, I don’t trample them all down except one individual. I capture a decent flower, the accessible leaves, a random root, an overview of the population. And report a single observation.
I don’t report 20 observations of a multi-family quail group. I try to capture each age class and sex, and the group or representative portion. When annotating, I tag the features I think are less often found in observations associated with that organism and harder for others to search for in the universe of observation — young, nests, eggs, bones, tracks, scat. But I do not report four separate observations if there is juvenile and adult in a nest with egg fragments.
I will make separate reports if different species are well represented in an image, but only for some unusual reason for individuals in a group of conspecifics. Sorry.
