We should not forget nearly all of us go birding for fun. The different levels of participation in the activity mean there must be some standards at some points. Hard to understand why anyone would get upset over a set of standards to regard a record as accepted or not. If some levels don't match your interests, work on the levels that work. Birders who want to set up their own standards have every right to do so and should not have to worry excessively whether a bird is countable or not countable. They are all countable, depending on what rules you want to use.
That said, why not have a space on the records sheet for all possible bird species? The people who look at the validity of the records can later label them as likely escapes, game farm birds, or whatever. My suggestion is that the records be kept and not be lost. The Chuckar and Bob White are bad examples because so many people who keep decorative fowl in their back yards are also likely to lose or release a few. This fact alone is interesting and should be shared so that all birders recognize the likely status of such a sighting. Personally, if I saw one in my back yard, I'd write it on the calendar! What about birds that are in the process of establishing new populations in the state? Suppose those first few Cardinals found in Minnesota in the 30's had been regarded as uncountable as escaped cage birds. We'd have lost a lot of interesting information if we started out calling them uncountable and ignored those first few records. Another example. I've been trying to track the gradual spread of Eurasian Tree Sparrows from their once small range in St. Louis. There are several web sites that accept records from amateur banders and post maps on the sites. Several of them have some interesting records of the Eurasian Tree Sparrow at some distance from St. Louis. I tried to learn a bit about how one of these sites collected or verified records. The answer included a comment that they dropped some geographically unlikely records of the species. Too bad. Those might have been some interesting bits of new information. There seems to be an accepted recent record from upper Michigan that is kind of geographically improbable. The first bird is always improbable. The point is that all data are valuable. We may have good reasons for ignoring data but I hate to see us take the risk of destroying it. Don Beimborn By Cedar Lake
