Here's another of those " Life Rules" of mine. " If I can think of it, somebody, somewhere will be doing it." Now you might think that's a bit cynical ... yes. But I suspect it's largely true. And I'm more than sure that lots of cheating at various different level goes on in the unreliable and dodgy world of " bird surveys." To be fair, often people don't even really think they're cheating. Let's take that RSPB " Big Garden Birdwatch" thing. There's loads of seemingly harmless things people do which are, in fact, cheating. [1] They start their " official watch"...then after ten blank minutes they say ,,,"er , there's not much going on, let's do it this afternoon instead." [2] They watch the garden in non-surveying mode, but when they see something good, they decide to start ! Subtle, but it's cheating. [3] They start quite well, but the birds dry up after 20 minutes. So they decide to do the rest later. [4] They count stuff that's flying 400m up in the air, and tell themselves that they can count it, because it might easily have spotted a mouse on the lawn and pounced on it. Yeah, right. [5] They decide that, although "their usual Jay" didn't turn up during the survey time, it's been in the garden for ages every other blasted day, so it's only fair to add it to the list! [6] They see a Wren .. then they see a Wren 20 minutes later ... and decide it counts as a "new" one because ... [1] it's obviously the "other one" of the pair. [2] it looks a bit smaller than the 1st one. [3] it looks a bit bigger than the 1st one. [4] one of its feathers is falling out. [5] it's got bird shit on its tail. [6] its song is a bit different. People have quite openly admitted doing some of those things ... and as I said above, I'm not sure they realised that it biases the results. Next time I'll tell you another really outrageous bit of swindling that I know has happened ... in a real, proper, Atlas-style survey!! So there.
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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