Birds which aren't rare - FW: [eBird Alert] Australian Capital Territory eBird Rare Bird Alerts

["Kim Farley via Canberrabirds " <>]

Thank you Shorty. You are correct. I am very much aware of this issue. It is affecting the reporting of around half a dozen species and has arisen recently where some eBirders are choosing subspecies rather than the species itself. In theory this is fine, but in nearly all cases the subspecies being selected is the only one present in the ACT - so there is no real benefit in selecting these for ACT Checklists.  I am currently  working through the eBird filters to remove the rarity flag on subspecies where only one occurs here. This will remove them from the Rare Birds Alerts.

In the longer term, I do not recommend assigning subspecies locally when only one subspecies occurs here. For a start, it complicates eBird Species Maps. For example, to understand the full occurrence of Australian Raven in the ACT, two Species Maps would be needed - one for Aust Raven and another for Aust Raven (Eastern). Luckily we do not have many subspecies records as yet - so remediation is still possible.

Striated Pardalote and Silvereye are the only two species where more than one subspecies occurs in the ACT - though I am happy to be corrected on that.

Kim

Writing as eBird reviewer 

On Wed, 3 Dec 2025, 6:21 pm shorty via Canberrabirds, <> wrote:

I am Sure Kim will chime in on this but I suspect that the observer is adding the ssp to their list and as such the filters will be set to zero hence the rare bird assignment to rare. I don't get why people are doing this as when eBird update the ssp it will adjust our sightings as such. So much extra work for nothing IMO for our reviewer.

Shorty

On Wed, Dec 3, 2025 at 6:07 PM Rob Geraghty via Canberrabirds <> wrote:

Hi All,

I gather that the additional descriptions recently added to many birds in
ebird are the reason why they are appearing as "rare"? Because so far,
there's few records of things like "Mistletoebird (Australian)" as opposed
to "Mistletoebird"?

I noticed that there's now an option for "Australian Raven (Eastern)"
instead of "Australian Raven", as another example, although I didn't see
that come up as rare.
Presumably the less specific names will be deprecated eventually?

See below.

-----Original Message-----
From: [mailto:m("birds.cornell.edu","ebird-alert");" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">]
Sent: Wednesday, 3 December 2025 3:02 PM
To:
Subject: [eBird Alert] Australian Capital Territory Rare Bird Alert <daily>

*** Species Summary:

- Black-tailed Nativehen (2 reports)
- Grey Shrikethrush (Brown-backed) (2 reports)
- Satin Flycatcher (1 report)
- Singing Bushlark (Australasian) (1 report)
- Brown Songlark (1 report)
- Silvereye (East Australian) (1 report)
- Mistletoebird (Australian) (1 report)

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