Hey everybody, This is in relation to the issue brought up by Rick Cech regarding the photos of the Spizella not being initially posted in a place where they were easily findable and publicly accessible. This is a concern that we have seen voiced a lot recently, and it's not going away, as birding intel gets more and more fragmented between different streams of communication. A great way to solve this issue is by putting your photos (or other media) into your eBird checklists. This USED to be only "*pretty easy*," since you had to put them onto a third party website, like Flickr, Picasa, etc. and then embed the links in your checklist, but now it is "*very easy*" since all you have to do is drag your photo from your computer directly into the checklist.
This then makes them viewable for everybody, as well as VERY easy to search for, by using the intuitive search functions on the eBird site. For a really good summary of why you should always put your documentation directly into your checklist, please read here: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/news/rich_media_launch/ One really good reason that I will mention here is that in general it saves people lots of time during the review process: you save time by not having to be involved in a back-and forth with an eBird moderator and having to E-Mail photos separately, eBird reviewers save time by not having to fish for additional details (which can sometimes feels like pulling teeth), and all people interested in the sighting save time by being able to quickly see the highest quality documentation possible very quickly, rather than poking around elsewhere online or asking other people "in the loop" about something they're interested in (democratize the documentation for all!). Here are a couple of examples of checklists, one a media-rich checklist, and one a non media-rich checklist, The media-rich one would be very helpful for incredulous people looking back in 100 years and wondering if the birders were actually seeing the stuff they claimed to see nowadays, (even the stuff that seems common now might one day be remarkable): Media-rich (including photos, audio, and photo of spectrograph): http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S25958695 Media-dull (at the time of posting, perhaps this will change with time!): http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S26392399 This isn't meant to call anybody specific out, as many people choose to make checklists like the latter. This goes for many people who post photos elsewhere (including places that aren;t accessible to the public, like private facebook groups or twitter accounts) or don't post at all: think about which of the preceding checklists would better satiate your interest and thirst for knowledge if you looked at these in a hundred years without having any firsthand knowledge of the day-to-day goings on of our many different rarity groups, be it facebook, yahoo groups, cornell-run listservs, twitter groups, or text message groups. The former is objectively better. For more information on the very quick and simple task of uploading photos and audio, here are two how-to links (the first should cover everything, and the second explains more about audio): http://help.ebird.org/customer/en/portal/articles/973966 http://ebird.org/content/ebird/news/addaudio/ Good Birding (and documenting!) -Doug Gochfeld. Brooklyn, NY. -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/NYSB.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
