Date: 1/25/26 10:52 pm From: Paul Conover via groups.io <zoiseaux...> Subject: Re: [labird] a forwarded email from Van: eBird photography rating
Labird,
I'd like to revisit this thread. Honestly, a lot of the problem
with eBird are eBird's fault. eBird is as much social media (I think of
it as "facebird") as it is a scientific database. eBird's emphasis on
elements like listing and photography ratings hook users in the way that
"likes" and "shares" do on other platforms--to the extent that attention
gets diverted from birds to birders. Until a birder asked me to go
through his photos and give them a high rating, I assumed that people
were looking at the birds, not the credits, but a lot of it really is
all about the birders.
As such, aside from rewarding clear focus, I don't see how the
ratings rubric has any value to birders. If you go to many species and
select "Best quality," you'll get a monotonous blur of breeding-plumaged
males facing the camera and posing for magazine cover portraits.
Unfortunately, birds have a lot of important fieldmarks and useful
ageing features that the guidelines completely ignore. Great portraits
do deserve 5 stars, but so do close-ups of the underside of warbler
tails, the wings of hummingbirds and gulls, the dorsal half of most
species, and head shots of just about every species. Ditto for different
plumages, ages, and sexes. I'd rather see 365 pictures of a single
Cinnamon Teal over the course of a year than 365 glamor shots of
different males in January that all look alike.
Why does the eBird rating system select for a gallery that looks
like a typical birder facebook page? Shouldn't ID usefulness be the driver?
Paul Conover
Lafayette
On 12/27/2025 7:25 PM, Paul Conover via groups.io wrote:
>
>
> *From: *James V Remsen <James.Remsen...>
> *Subject: **Rating eBird photos*
> *Date: *December 26, 2025 at 6:03:26 PM CST
> *To: *LABIRD <labird...>
>
>
> LABIRD: This is worth a read by all you eBird photographers out there:
>
> https://ebirdcommentary.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-morass-that-is-photo-rating-of.html >
>
>
> ===================
>
> Dr. J. V. Remsen
> Emeritus Prof. of Natural Science and Curator of Birds
> Museum of Natural Science/Dept. Biological Sciences
> LSU, Baton Rouge, LA 70803
> najames<at>LSU.edu
>
>
>
>
>
>
