When Rich posted yesterday, I was anxiously awaiting any news at all from him and read it immediately on the basis of the sender's name, regardless of the subject line. I and many others appreciated his efforts to re-find the Violent Green Swallow in the cold and wind. That said, the "RWSW" in the subject line caught my eye. I haven't seen that code since I finally tore myself away from it in the late 80s or 90s, but my old childhood notebooks contain many such entries, prior to the standardization of four-letter codes and the splitting of the Rough-winged Swallow complex into several species, including our NRWS. I'm guessing that Rich's use of codes goes back at least that far, and that his typo dates him to the earliest years of this expedience.
I vividly remember my first exposure to the idea of four-letter codes for birds: an article in Bird Watcher's Digest around 1981. I thought it was a great idea and adopted it in my own notes immediately. My early notebooks need a little tlc to interpret: my "BWWA" meant Black-and-white Warbler, a super-familiar species that nested behind my house, rather than Blue-winged Warbler, which took me a couple of years to find in its much lower numbers and more localized breeding sites within biking distance of my house. When I finally found my first Blue-winged Warblers in the Great Swamp, I realized I had a problem. Ditto for my discovery of a colony of Bank Swallows at the Plains Road super fund site, which was accomplished only after a couple of notebooks were filled with "BASW," referring to the ubiquitous, chirpy, long-tailed one. Anyway, I'd like to commend the use of four-letter codes, not just for note-taking, but for efficiently navigating eBird. Standard codes work in eBird for any search at the species level, and, in certain kinds of navigation, down to subspecies level, for those that have codes assigned (e.g. searching media for "YPWA" brings up photos and recordings of Yellow Palm Warbler). This last observation reminds me of a significant and largely under-appreciated virtue of four-letter codes. Fluency in them will teach you a lot about taxonomy and field-identifiability at the subspecies and superspecies levels. Subspecies that have been assigned codes are those that are distinctive enough that banders are expected to be able to distinguish and record them as such. So why not birders, too? In fact, many of the codes that were initially applied to distinctive subspecies, such as "ETTI" (vs. Black-crested Titmouse), have since been split. In other cases, it was enlightening to learn that I wasn't supposed to use "WIFL" when banding the locally common breeding Empid, because of difficulties in distinguishing it from "ALFL" in the hand, when these birds simply refuse to sing and were coded collectively as TRFL (Traill's Flycatcher). This challenged me to seek reliable visual features to distinguish them, which I believe I have been able to do, in large part. If anybody has old issues of Bird Watcher's Digest (or superior hacking skills) and could share that forty year-old article with me, I'd appreciate it. The way I remember it, the proposal wasn't originally geared toward banding, but toward ease of field-recording and simplicity of computer entry (at that time, via Atari 800 for me). Shai Mitra Bay Shore -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/nysbirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birding.aba.org/maillist/NY01 Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
