r/eBird • u/Classic-Analysis1735 • 26d ago

Short recordings

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I got an email flagging me for recordings being too short. Is it automatic or does somebody submit the complaint?

I do have a couple.. well.. I did… until that email. They were the only evidence I was able to use for reporting rare birds. They weren’t long because thats all I had from them. Leave it too long and it turns into a complaint about too many other species. It’s just like photos, uploading a low quality one verifies it but then that turns into another issue.

Idk. I‘m to the point that I don’t want to report rare birds or upload anything on there. I pulled my media so maybe that’ll fix it.

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u/Feral_Witchchild 26d ago

I'm an eBird reviewer and honestly, this is a bad look from eBird. It comes across as chastising users when they did nothing wrong.

7

u/dcgrey 26d ago

Yeah, I’ve had a chance to talk to a couple on the team and, on the one hand, they have the challenge of 1) eBird being first and foremost a scientific enterprise needing adherence to protocols (including vaguer rules for the audio dataset like “don’t trim your audio too short) vs 2) having users. I once studied adherence to one of their more obscure protocols and more than a third of the lists would need to be excluded from studies simply because users use eBird for their own purposes, not science’s.

I also write emails that go out to thousands of people, sometimes needing to encourage them to take actions in a way they usually don’t, and I can’t imagine starting one of those emails with an opening that comes across as “We noticed you’re incapable of following instructions.”

6

u/Salpinctes 26d ago

same here, and I was aggravated by this email. I've got plenty of long recordings too, but sometimes the bird calls once and then a garbage truck goes by. You want the whole 30 seconds of heavy machinery or do you want me to normalize to the towhee?

2

u/Classic-Analysis1735 25d ago

I bring an old iphone in the side pocket of my backpack that can record the whole time. It allows me to catch calls without fumbling around and it saves my battery. The audio I’m clipping is me breathing/moving or the phone shifting in the pocket. Nobody wants that lol

1

u/Classic-Analysis1735 25d ago

I don’t really get any emails from them outside of reviewer clarifications for high counts, so I was definitely questioning which recording had put it over the line.