Viewing post #1052881 by molanic

mellielong said:Isn't there a bird identification site anywhere on the internet? Like what BAMONA is for moths and butterflies (for North America, anyway)? I would think someone out there would want to track data on birds just like we do insects. But I know some sites only track certain birds, not all, so maybe that's part of the problem? Anyone know of a site like I'm talking about that would help when we can't identify a bird?

That's what I use iNaturalist for, and not just birds but all forms of life. I feel bad though that I recommended it for Becky to id that warbler and nobody has helped with it yet. I don't really know what happened there because birds usually get very quick ids, and she had good pictures to go off of too. Usually the only ones I don't get ids on within a day or two are those species that are really hard to id from photos alone. In my case that is usually the groupings of flycatchers or groupings of thrushes that look alike. I've got over 200 bird observations there where I got an id confirmation to make it research grade, and only 8 that didn't (and they are those tricky species).

Only reason I can think of that she didn't get an id is that it is a tricky one, or she just happened to upload at a bad time and most of the people that give out ids missed it somehow. That site is all just fellow naturalists, although most of them do seem to work in the wildlife related sciences. Some get designated as curators, but they do more work on keeping the taxa database up to date, than working on ids for people I think.

I use BugGuide a lot for identifying insects and spiders and also BAMONA for butterflies and moths to a lesser extent. I haven't seen any part of eBird that is for help on identifications, but maybe I just missed it. It seems like they would at least have a forum or something there for that. It might help ensure that the checklists people are submitting are accurate and complete?