The Networked Bird Observatory Blog

I’ve mentioned before how impressed I’ve been by the way identification consensus emerged around some of the trickier shots in the game; by and large I can’t think of any significant miscarriages of justice.

The only real regret I have about the identifications made during the game were these two species, neither of which ever got enough votes to qualify for the ID that I think the images deserved. (The Yellow-rumped Warbler would have been on the list, too, except that one of the handful of shots we got of that bird made it to an ID.)

First up are these two shots, taken at 11:06 a.m. on October 26 by petemokazfi and robin54, respectively:

I’ve written about them before, and the more I look at them the more convinced I get that they really do show an Orange-crowned Warbler. Sadly, we never got the 2/3 majority we needed to get the ID. For the first image, the vote count we ended up with was:

7 Orange-crowned Warbler
3 Lesser Goldfinch
1 Warbling Vireo
1 Wilson's Warbler

For the second image, the final tally was:

8 Orange-crowned Warbler
3 Lesser Goldfinch
1 Warbling Vireo
1 Hooded Oriole

So, we would have needed 3 more votes to flip the first one, and 2 more votes to get the second one. But with voting closed with the end of the game, that will have to remain an unrealized promise.

Likewise with this image, which was taken way back on May 7 at 1:58 p.m. by bluebean:

I wrote about this image before on the blog (see Well, Hello Little Lady), and again, the more I look at the image the more likely I think it is that that was a female Western Tanager. The final vote tally for this image was:

14 Western Tanager
4 Lesser Goldfinch
3 Bullock's Oriole
1 American Goldfinch
1 Summer Tanager
1 House Wren
1 Pygmy Nuthatch

So we would have needed 8 more votes to flip that one.

Oh well. Better luck next time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Records and Rarities, Rules and Scoring, The Birds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.