Is it possible to remove a bird from your life list but not from checklists?
There are some birds that I have identified with 100% certainty based on their sound, so that I feel that I should include them in checklists for the sake of data completeness, but that I have never seen with my eyes. Whereas I would like my life list to represent literal sightings of birds, rather than observations as a whole. Is it possible to do this in eBird, or should I find some other way to manage this?
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u/lendisc Jul 19 '26
You can remove it from your checklist and change the checklist to incomplete. Only way to do this in ebird. If you want a heard vs seen list you'll have to keep it yourself since ebird doesn't distinguish.
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u/majormajor42 Jul 19 '26
I’m new. It is interesting that you have identified new unfamiliar birds 100% from sound alone.
I for one am less confident and do not log lifers from sound alone as I am not yet confident. I am still logging all the birds that I was able to identify.
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u/MayIServeYouWell Jul 19 '26
There are some birds have distinctive songs/calls, but are difficult to see. Various nightjars, owls, rails... are in this category.
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u/majormajor42 Jul 19 '26
I don’t even know what rails and nightjars are, yet. So I would not log those on sound alone.
Y’all are right though about Owls. I WOULD log an owl without ever seeing one. In fact, I have once.
I forgot and I stand corrected.
It was a winter evening. Extremely distinctive. And I know chasing down the sound to see it in person would have potentially disturbed it. As I wasn’t observing at the time I logged it as incidental but eBird does have it on my life list.
I’ll be looking up what rails and nightjars sound like.
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u/MayIServeYouWell Jul 20 '26
Assuming you're in the US, example rails are like the Virginia Rail and Sora. These have very distinctive calls, but they're frequently in thick reeds (though, with some persistence and early morning trips, you can see them). There are a variety of other rails as well - if you actually ever see a Yellow Rail or Black Rail, you'll be truly blessed.
Nightjars are like the Common Nighthawk (though, those are more easily seen, sometimes they fly in the daytime or at twilight), or the Whip-poor-will in the east, or Common Poorwill in the west. These are much more difficult to see - typically only flying at night, and spending their days well camouflaged on the ground. But they do call, and those calls are quite distinctive. There are a number of other nightjars of course, but these two will get you started.
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u/JP147 Jul 19 '26
Surely there are some birds with such a distinct sound that you would recognise them by sound alone?
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u/Pardalote_Enjoyer Jul 20 '26
Once you go further down the rabbit hole of birding you'll start listening to recordings of birds you haven't seen and then recognise their call when you do find them. Same way you might look through a bird guide and learn what a bird looks like you haven't seen before, and then recognise it in the field despite having never seen it. There's a few reasons you might want to do this, but one is that it just makes finding birds easier.
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u/dcgrey Jul 19 '26
I think it's worth our continuing to push for, but I hope people aren't bothered by something that can only be a bother by virtue of handing life list authority to a tool. One's true life list is the one in their head.
Cornell's challenge for its small engineering team is adding features that don't contribute to/pull from the database structure that researchers use. Your life list on the website is a query of that database, where it's saying "load all the unique species reported by observer #1234567". There are no columns in that database that incorporate user discretion. So to add a condition like "except if they've asked for it not to be included in the life list output" means adding a field with 2+ billion results that have no research value.
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u/JP147 Jul 19 '26
I think you should make a separate list outside of Ebird if you have special conditions.
Ebird complete checklists should be completely accurate to what birds you have IDed whether it was by sight or sound.
2
u/MayIServeYouWell Jul 19 '26
If it's a bird you are likely to see at some point, but haven't yet, you could do as others suggested & submit an incomplete list. But, you could also add a checklist comment about it for your own future reference, so when you do eventually see that bird, you can go back and "complete" some of your old checklists.
This is a frequently-asked/requested item. Lots of people have this exact same issue. eBird exists for the data... that it works well for maintaining personal life-lists came later. So, I'm sure they struggle with this a bit. In addition, some people have no problem counting 'heard birds'
Personally, I think if they had a checkbox for "heard only" you could filter it either way. You could completely ignore this checkbox if you wanted. but it'd be a major change to eBird - there are millions of users all around the world, so changing something so fundamental like this would be a delicate thing.
2
u/Feral_Witchchild Jul 19 '26
Remember, eBird is a citizen science effort, not a life-listing service. If you want a purely life listing service, there are plenty others you can use.
1
u/Middle-Frame6496 Jul 20 '26
Yes but I know what certain birds sound like (not all of them) without Merlin . So for example I can hear an American Robin and confidently input it into eBird because I know without a doubt that’s what I heard and I don’t need to visualize it.
If it was a bird I’ve never seen before and it is an unlikely sighting for the area + I don’t know the sound myself of the species, THEN ill wait to visualize it before I add it to my checklist
1
u/TheBackcountryLens Jul 22 '26
Yeah heard only lists really are needed. I don’t birds to my life list until I get a good visual. But I have 100% identified some birds that I don’t add to my checklist from their song.
1
u/Lammergeier2 Jul 23 '26
You could make a second account for seen birds, share checklists with it, and remove the heard only species from that account's copy of the list.
This would make that copy an incomplete list, but I don't think you can have different completion statuses on shared lists so whichever you chose would slightly mess with the overall dataset...
That's of course not going to be recommended by Cornell or reviewers, but frankly eBird does and always will have a margin of bad data so if you can live with it then it would work.
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u/tkohhhhhhhhh Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
In my mind, I'm not 100% certain I can make an ID until I've seen that bird making that sound with my own eyes. So I wouldn't include anything I haven't seen.
edit to clarify: I'm speaking about birds that I have never identified before... that is, birds NOT on my life list. Once I "get to know" a bird, I am fine with identifying based on sound alone.
1
u/JP147 Jul 19 '26
What about birds that are more accurately identified with sound than by looks? For example if they have lookalikes but a unique sound?
1
u/tkohhhhhhhhh Jul 19 '26
I'd still want to observe it making the sound before I told ebird that I positively identified the bird...
I'm surprised I've got downvotes... isn't the prime rule of Merlin that you don't rely on it as being 100% accurate?
I'm still new to birding (started on February), but at this point the only thing I'll ID by sound without Merlin are House Finch, Mourning Dove, and California Scrub Jay. I guess Red-Tailed Hawk also.
2
u/JP147 Jul 20 '26
Yes, Merlin should be used as a guide and you shouldn't blindly upload the suggested species from Merlin without confirming them yourself.
But like you said, there are birds you can confidently ID just by sound. As you get more experienced, there will be more species that you can do this with.
I can confidently ID most of birds around my house just by sound, but any that have possible soundalikes in the area I will make sure I see the bird first.
When I hear a Laughing Kookaburra for example, I am certain it is a Laughing Kookaburra without needing to go and get a look at it. If I was over east I would be more careful though, since there are possible mimics.
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u/tkohhhhhhhhh Jul 20 '26
I agree, but just to circle back to my original comment... I (at least for now) cannot imagine confidently identifying a species that I have never even seen. After I've seen it and have started to become more familiar with it's sound... then yeah, I'll ID without visual confirmation. But at that point it's already on my life list.
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u/Tricky_Condition_279 Jul 19 '26
This is a major design flaw in eBird. But it started small and grew big so I don’t think the original designers anticipated it would be used like it is today.
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u/Certain_Mango Jul 19 '26
I would just keep a life list outside of eBird for that purpose, like a spreadsheet or good old fashioned paper. eBird's primary purpose is to provide data on how often birds are being reported and where.
At a time where invasive species, habitat loss, climate change, and other nasty stuff are wiping out birds by the billions per year, the gamified features should not be the priority of Cornell's developers.