Reporting Koels - why?

[Julian Robinson <>]

The collateral damage resulting when some members prescribe which chat
topics are acceptable or want to prevent others from posting what
interests them (no matter how sensible the proposed restriction) is that
it stifles free reporting and free-flowing discussions and more
especially, it stops a horde of people from even
participating.    A recurring theme of COG-outing
conversations is the number of articulate and knowledgeable COG people
who say they are too afraid of criticism to post on this chatline and I
think that is a shame.  It should not be a nerve-wracking
experience.  

On the other hand it does not help most of us if the more experienced
birders get so annoyed that they take their bat and ball and play
exclusively in the twitch lists so that much interesting information and
discussion is then lost to the majority.

Everyone has their own interests and level of experience and it'd seem
that being selective in which posts to open is a skill that we need to
acquire for our own sanity.This ought to prevent most of the frustration
that each of us might feel at some time when seeing subjects monopolise
the list for a period but about which we have absolutely no
interest.

I enjoy the koel and spoonbill sagas although I don't open most of the
koel posts since enough of the info is usually in the subject line. It
was interesting seeing different people's takes on the spoonbills and
what they saw, and how things develop there in 'real time'.  This
'real time' aspect -- following the story -- would be entirely missed if
we all reported such info privately to a nominated data recording
person.  And in part it is the existence of the public conversation
that encourages and reminds people to post at all i.e. it maintains
interest.  With private recording it's a fair bet many people would
forget about the spoonbills or not bother to report and less info would
eventually be acquired.  

It really is very easy to ignore every post labelled "Spoonbills at
Kellys", but if nothing were posted it'd be impossible for
anyone who might be interested to follow developments.

And seeing a dramatic increase in Koel reports on the chatline is as
useful or informative as a lot of higher-browed research might be. 
It's accessible to all as it happens, highly visible, well reinforced and
self limiting.  The costs (requiring some people to ignore some
posts) would seem to be small?

Julian R


At 07:16 PM 7/11/2008, you 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



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