I uploaded my recent observation to see how people felt about this. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/146666594 There are numerous threads on the forum talking about drawings as evidence https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/is-there-an-observation-field-in-use-to-flag-observations-with-drawings…

Some people might be tempted to identify the observation as Homo sapiens, so avoid misunderstandings, I would continue to add a description, and a comment after your initial ID, making it very clear what the sound is intended to represent.

This is more prone to misidentifications than a drawing where you can at least show what you saw schematically, you can’t whistle the way you’re able to separate coal tit from goldcrest, so unless the call is so distinctive you can’t misid it, that’s not the best idea to try to imitate birds.

All those points make sense, but realistically the same principle applies to drawings and even pictures. If it’s a bird (or anything else) that might need sound or behavior or a minute detail, the drawing or picture won’t provide enough evidence. Maybe mine will or won’t be ID’d. But to me the prac…

Yup, and many drawings stay at high level, with audio there’ll be more situations where people can hear something different from what was heard, with normal bird recording you at least have its voice, can check the sonogram, with human voice I’m afraid there’ll be a lot of misids, esp if observer do…

Interesting idea, but I have my doubts. I think my main reservation is that with a drawing, it is immediately clear it is a drawing, and identifiers can move on if they wish. With a recording, it will be saved in the database alongside audios of the species itself, and it is harder to know that it d…

As someone who enjoys identifying bird audio on iNat, this idea meets our needs for creativity and fun! From a data quality standpoint, probably the same rules for drawing: Was made where the observation occurred and right away after hearing. [image] deboas: reluctant to listen to audios if th…

I wonder how many of you could tell the difference between me imitating a Red-tailed Hawk and me imitating a Steller’s Jay imitating a Red-tailed Hawk?

same could be said of actual audio of bird calls tbh. Unless the bird was actually seen while calling, then theoretically any bird call uploaded from the east coast of Australia could actually be a superb lyrebird mimicking the apparent species

It seems like it should be fine, but echoing those data quality concerns, one wonders if perhaps there needs to be a change in iNat policies to make those types of observations (drawings and repeated… audio… things?) have some kind of flag/tag so that they can be excluded in research that requires s…

[image] artemesia: data quality concerns this strikes me as such an odd concern. over in eBird, people generally aren’t asking for or providing audio recordings or photos, and yet that data gets used for research all the time.

Whistling/Humming as Evidence

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Are drawings evidence? General	113	5974	March 31, 2025
Is there a way to post species without proof General	34	861	July 23, 2025
Question About Audio Observations General question , audio-observations , sounds	17	585	April 24, 2025
Audio recordings of bird song/calls General	53	5001	March 10, 2023
What is evidence? General	60	8077	August 5, 2021

Whistling/Humming as Evidence

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