BirdTrack
Understandably, the change of instruction from the Norfolk Bird Report Council (not to be confused with the
Norfolk Records Committee who assess descriptions of local rarities) since earlier this year has caused confusion. It is unhelpful to speculate about the thinking behind the change; if you want to ask for more information or make your own feelings known, please contact Andy Stoddart directly.
For all queries relating specifically to BirdTrack, please contact the BirdTrack team at BTO via email
birdtrack[at]bto.org or telephone 01842 750050 (9am–5pm, Mon–Fri). That's effectively me at the moment, though we have a Support Officer starting very soon.
If you choose to discuss the specific workings of BirdTrack with other individuals, please note that a person's level of birding experience in Norfolk or beyond gives no indication of their knowledge of BirdTrack's existing and planned functionality. Again, my advice is to contact the BirdTrack team.
I’ve given brief responses to the questions/points raised by ‘crapbirder’ and Carol Baldock below, to save them having to repeat these via email. However, to keep things manageable at this end, I will be unable to answer any further detailed questions on BirdTrack in a Norfolk context via this forum.
All the best and good birding,
Nick Moran
BirdTrack Organiser
BTO, Thetford
To my knowledge, at least one other county bird recorder has complained in the past that BirdTrack had no mechanism in place which would allow unwanted records to be filtered by county recorders. My understanding was at the time, the matter would be addressed and it would be helpful if the BirdTrack organisation were to clarify the current status of a filtering process.
Filters are available to County Recorders via the ‘Explore Club Records’ tool (akin to the ‘Explore My Records’ tool that individual observers can use on their own records). Due to the myriad of different 'cuts' of the data that different County Recorders/Database Managers want, an alternative approach that many use is to export all records for a given year and do the filtering in Excel.
We are continuing to develop better tools for people to interact with the data; I am happy to outline these via email if asked.
One other thing to note on this point: we don’t recognise the concept of ‘unwanted records’ [insert appropriate smiley!]. As far as BirdTrack is concerned,
all bird (and dragonfly and mammal!) records have value to conservation and science. To reduce bias, the system does not place particular emphasis on gathering records of certain species (though we sometimes use individual species to flag up the value of certain sorts of data, such as the recent use of Cetti's Warbler to highlight the importance of gathering breeding evidence
http://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/birdtrack/news-archive/2015-05/cettis-warbler ).
Many of you will have already seen
this local example of the (sometimes unforeseen) value of recording everything, instead of being selective.
I have had a discussion with a very experienced Norfolk birder , in recent times, who was very surprised that Bird Track generates an auto form for notifiable Norfolk species for every person that sees the bird , not just the original finder. Where a bird stays for a period of time , does this mean that all of these sightings of say one bird that stays in one place for a period of time and is seen by lots of observers are all sent on to the County Recorder?
County Recorders can set thresholds for local rarity, high counts, and early and late dates for migrants. These in turn flag up to observers when they submit records through BirdTrack. The local rarity setting also generates an online form (modelled closely on the local rarity forms that are provided locally across Britain). If a local rarity has already recently been recorded at a location, the BirdTrack form will not be presented. Despite this, an observer can still sometimes be presented with the form for a ‘twitched/known’ rarity (for reasons I won't bore you with here). In this case, we ask observers to simply circumvent the form by clicking the ‘BirdTrack Home’ button underneath it (as Chris Allen mentions).
I hold no brief for either BirdTrack or the Norfolk Bird Report but it was not particularly helpful on opening the link Chris Allen kindly provided, to find the first line read "if you record a species that is rarely encountered within a bird recording area" and then details of how to proceed from thereon. This procedure makes the assumption that the person submitting the record has sufficient local knowledge and experience to make the correct decision.
I used the phrase “bird recording area” simply because not all local recording areas are counties; they may be ‘nested’ areas within counties, like the recording area of the Nar Valley Ornithological Society within Norfolk, or cover more than one county, e.g. Leicestershire and Rutland. Sorry if I caused undue confusion here but I did not want to use ‘county’ when that term has a specific meaning that is not always applicable in this case.
As explained above, the procedure does not make any assumptions about the observer's local knowledge and experience; it applies the same thresholds, as set/updated by the local recorders, to all records and alerts the observer accordingly.
The BirdTrack registration process requires no proof of either knowledge or experience but appears to concentrate on personal information useful for marketing purposes.
BirdTrack asks for personal information so that bird records are always associated with recognisably-named, contactable observers. Allowing records to be entered against just a pseudonym or email address (which can change or become obsolete) would undermine the value of the data as part of the biological record. Users are also asked (and encouraged to give) their permission for their records and contact details to be shared with local recorders, for the same reason.
The thresholds I mentioned previously flag up unusual sightings to inexperienced observers (and careless typists, which can certainly apply to me!) at the point of record entry. Additionally, validation tool allows local recorders to follow up individual records with (contactable, named) observers.
