Reporting Koels - why?

["Alberta Hayes" <>]

In regards to this discussion, I couldn't disagree more with most of the people who have commented other than Steve.

 

I'm quite a young birder (though not as young as Tobias).  Part of the reason I was so happy about finding this list 2 years ago was because there were experienced and novice birders, and everyone could comment regardless of how much experience they had.  The less experienced birders (myself included)  could share their finds with people who could give them advice about where to find the bird again, or characteristics of the birds.

 

Some time ago there was a discussion on the chatline about how to appeal to other backyard birders as a group and recruit new members to COG.  I feel that the types of conversations we are having at the moment regarding spoonbills and koels where the more experienced birders vocally dissaprove of other members commenting so much on particular birds and sightings is detrimental to the numbers of people contributing to the list.  I imagine it is upsetting to hear your comments are not worth much to other readers of the list, and such thinking causes much more damage than good. After all, not many people bird in the Tuggeranong area but the few of us that do submit observations to the list would possibly never comment again if all you Belconnen area birders decided to tell us our observations held no interest to you!

 

I realise this wouldn't be the object of Geoffrey, Martin, and others comments.  But please be aware that there are a couple of hundred people subscribed to this list and intrests will vary widely.  I wish I had a koel to report!

 

Alberta Hayes, Monash.

 

 

On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 7:16 PM, wallaces <> wrote:

As a relatively new contributor to Canberrabirds and as one of the people who obviously annoyed Alistair, might I say that what is not interesting to some is interesting to others.  I would much rather people report what they see rather than assume it is not of interest.  I am not keen on the suggestions of sending personal emails to a person who will summarise the data as this takes away the most important reason for me to use Canberrabirds - locating birds that are of interest to me and keeping in touch with developments such as the nesting of the spoonbills. While Koels are not anything special for me (I lived on the NSW north coast for many years) they are an interesting bird for Canberra and I hope that reporting their location can help others (such as Rod) to locate them. 

 

I encourage people to use Canberrabirds freely.  While I am not interested in a large number of the reports and discussions, filtering them out is a small price to pay for the information which is of interest to me. We cannot expect everyone to be interested in every report and it would be a shame to have people reduce their reporting because they assume that some people may not find it interesting.

 

Steve