eBird and the 365 Checklists: Quantity Over Quality?

Perhaps you would enjoy the comfort and familiarity of something well-established and obvious stated to you. Let's try this on for size...eBird is good, free, and always improving. It sorts your lists, informs you of rarities, gives you access to reams of data, and contributes to many scientific studies. I mean, chances are that you got at least one life bird because of eBird, and life birds are practically priceless.

That said, eBird does not have the kind of backing that Google or Oracle does. The people responsible for bringing eBird into the world have not become mega-celebrity billionaires as a result. There is no army of coders behind the face of eBird, gentrifying communities and causing white flight, no legion of brogrammers ruining your favorite local bars. For good or ill, eBird is just not that big.

What that means for us users is that change does not come at a rapid clip, which is fine...the real bugs in eBird or the app tend to get sorted very quickly, while new features are rolled out more slowly. Totally understandable. However, there is one particularly irksome thing in eBird that grinds my gears more than anything else...

This one particular shortfall of eBird is the 365 rule. Now at this point, if you are still reading this, I'm assuming you are an eBird user...if you're not, I apologize for how bored you must be right now, but I am not going to accept the blame for that. Anyhow, let me give an example of what I am talking about....

Joey Birdwatcher photographs a Common Goldeneye. He thinks it is a Barrow's and attaches his photo of it to a checklist. Barrow's Goldeneye is not flagged as rare where Joey Birdwatcher went birding, so the regional reviewers do not see his error.

The Great Ornithologist Felonious Jive, who is not an eBird reviewer, decides one day that he wants to look at pictures of Barrow's Goldeneyes submitted through eBird. He comes across Joey Birdwatcher's photo, which is obviously misidentified. Felonious sees the link to click to "report" the photo, and goes to click on it to report the misidentified bird. What he sees is this:

Now nerds, before you freak out, ML45885311 is not actually a misidentified photo, this is just an example for the sake of a screenshot, so calm down. Anyways, you will see that Felonious has only a single option here, and although he considers the misidentified goldeneye both offensive and inappropriate, he does not believe that eBird wants this photo to be flagged as such just because it features a misidentified bird. He figures they have something totally different in mind, like porn or a mound of dead squirrels. So what is Felonious to do? He is not a reviewer, but as you probably know, you don't have to be a reviewer to flag misidentified bird photos. Sadly, he "only" submitted 364 different checklists last year. Had he submitted 365 different checklists, eBird would have rewarded him with an entirely new power...

Wrong species...there it is. Had Felonious been in the 365 club, he would have seen something like this instead...indeed, he would have the power to flag photos of misidentified birds.

As a veteran birder who can identify the shit out of a great many birds, I'm not stoked about how photo-flagging privileges are awarded. It really seems to be that the quantity of checklists submitted has greater importance, in this instance, than observer quality. But let's face it, the number of eBird checklists submitted in a year has almost no correlation to the person's skill set as an observer. Many of the continent's most notorious stringers actually are out birding a lot and submit a great many eBird checklists. Baffling, but true.

The 365 rule also rewards obsessive birders who create checklists while stopped at red lights (no, I'm not making this up) or on daily binocularless walks to their office, which I guess can be fun for listing purposes but generally have very little scientific value. Are these the best birders to be doing quality control in eBird?

Another point worth bringing up is that the 365 rule penalizes users who have lives outside of birding...believe it or not, not all birders are retired, or wealthy/free enough to be able to bird most of the week, every week. If I still lived life as a Perpetual Weekend six months a year, 365 complete checklists would not seem out of reach, but alas I work full time, year-round, and now I have a baby to care for...let's face it, I'm not going to submit 365 checklists in 2017, and probably not in 2018 either. I will be birding regularly of course, and not to sound conceited (a popular character trait among birders) but I consider my ability to ID birds in photos to be above average. I will not stoop to stoplight birding just to bump up my checklist total, or make checklists for the walk from my driveway to my front door...I have my dignity, and know that these sorts of lists generally cater to the birder's dirtiest obsessive desires more than they do the scientific community.

Of course, it's easy to just complain about something without offering a better idea. An alternative solution? Give eBird reviews the ability to award users this power. Perhaps a reviewer can only give flagging privileges to a certain number of other users, so not everyone and their mother is patrolling eBird and mistakenly flagging photos as the wrong species. Of course not all reviewers have the best judgement either, but I think most would recommend the most skilled users who could flag misidentified photos.

What is the problem indeed?  I wish I could do something about this Orange-breasted Bunting, but alas I cannot. I am unworthy of such immense power...and I don't know who the appropriate reviewers are or how to reach them. But for the sake of finishing this post, I'm sure there are other good (better?) ideas out there for figuring out who should be able to flag misidentified birds...my solution is no Final Solution.

To reiterate, I am grateful for what eBird does already and the vast majority of changes they have implemented over the last few years...but this one is hard to swallow.