It's a good title that .. "The Second Wren". It draws you in. You're intrigued. I wonder if you can guess what it refers to. Here's two fairly useless picture clues...... 2 Ad Fem. But most men look like this They look very different ...we get used to it. Crumbs ! The instructions for The Big Garden Birdwatch, hereafter called TBGBW, have always shown us little photos of the main birds we're likely to see. It is always nice to have our intelligence belittled. But, in an astonishing breakthrough, they've shown us snaps of males and females of Blackbirds, Chaffinches and House Sparrows this time. Coo !! So ...here's a thing. Ages ago, I pointed out to a waiting world that there was inbuilt bias in the protocol for TBGBW which, as far as I know, has never been addressed. Its all to do with "The Second Wren Scenario" You see a a Wren, and you write it in your notebook. It flies away. Ten tense minutes later, another Wren turns up. But ...but ... is it the same one ...or is it a "new" turn-up ?? If you can't be sure, you can't count it. On the other hand, if a male Chaffinch arrives and leaves, ..and then a female arrives, you know you've got two separate birds. That means that sexually dimorphic species like Chaffinches will tend to get recorded more often than, say, Wrens .... because when "The Second Wren" turns up it won't get counted. Maybe .. just maybe, they've got an algorithm to sort that out .... but if they have, I don't recall anyone mentioning it. So I'll leave that with you. Somewhere on here, way back in the Stone Age, I've written more extensively about this crucial issue. But I haven't tracked it down yet. So .... 'tis Music Time. But what if birds could do a bit of Shape-Shifting ? That would make a right mess of all those surveys and censuses .. oh yes. And coincidentally, here's a whole song about shape-shifting ...
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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