Oops! Correcting the record.

With a big thanks to Bob Mulvihill

(Listen to the radio version here. And remember my program about birding Hawaii Wednesday night at 7 pm CDT.)

A Connecticut Warbler photographed on June 10, 2021 in the Sax-Zim Bog. This bird was singing vigorously, so if there were any doubt about his ID, my recording ends that!

I’ve been posting photos to Flickr.com since 2005. Flickr integrates with Adobe Lightroom, so after cropping and making a few basic adjustments; tagging each photo with species name, date, and location; and writing the species name as the photo’s title, I press a button and Lightroom uploads them to Flickr. Very importantly, Flickr honors the copyrights of its users, so instead of posting photos directly onto social media sites, I use Flickr links when I post photos to Facebook. And virtually all the photos I post here are linked to the original on Flickr.

When my daughter developed the database for my website, she integrated it with Flickr so when you go to any of my species pages (such as the Connecticut Warbler page), you’ll see the most recent photos I’ve entered to Flickr, and if you click on “See All,” it’ll bring you, via Flickr, to all the photos I’ve ever posted that refer to that species.

So accuracy when I tag and title photos is very important. I must have been tired last spring when entering my Florida photos. I tagged my batch of photos of Bachman’s Sparrows properly, but I typed the title of that batch as Bachman’s Warbler. An anonymous person quite snarkily wrote as a public comment:

This bird is reportedly extinct. Are you sure about the identity? If so, you may want to report the sighting on bird forums and to the Audubon Society.

My mislabeling an obvious sparrow as a warbler was an egregious error on my part, but one of sloppiness and carelessness, not a misidentification. I immediately fixed the mistake, but my embarrassment was eclipsed by my irritation aroused by the critic’s snark.

Extremely poor photo of a Tennessee Warbler

I’m often my own best critic. Last night, when going through the photos I’d taken on a field trip at Park Point yesterday, I realized that one of the birds I’d called out as an Orange-crowned Warbler was really a Tennessee Warbler. I got a clear look at the yellowish undertail coverts on the first one we saw in the field, but when another very similar bird showed up a little while later, I must not have checked the undertail coverts. I’d managed to take an extremely poor photo of the second bird, and I couldn’t help but see that the undertail feathers were white, making it a Tennessee Warbler. I corrected my eBird Checklist, which I’d shared with the participants, so everyone received notice of my error and the correction. That was smooth and easy.

On September 2, I got several fine photos of a bird at my birdbath. When I saw it with my eyes and binoculars, I immediately thought Mourning Warbler, but a close look at my photos showed a solid gray hood with no white in the throat and complete white eye ring. A Connecticut Warbler! I immediately posted the sighting, documented with photos, to eBird. I also wrote my September 4 Substack post and podcast about it. I was delighted!

But several days later I got a private backchannel message via FlickrMail (which I’m not good at checking so didn’t notice for several days more). It read:

Hi Laura,
I love all your photos, but I’m afraid I have to burst your bubble. Your Connecticut is an adult female Mourning Warbler. The eye ring actually is broken, albeit slightly, and its throat is whitish. Also, its undertail coverts fall well short of the tip of the rectrices.

We used to band birds much like yours at Powdermill, and we also got quite a few Connecticut’s each fall. They have a different shape, and that’s what first had me looking more closely at your bird. Sorry, but I thought you’d want to know.

Best,
Bob Mulvihill

The Powdermill Avian Research Center Bob refers to is well-known and reputable. But several of my experienced birding friends had confirmed my Connecticut Warbler ID, it passed the eBird review process without question, and some of the photos posted on eBird had been given four stars. It HAD to be a Connecticut Warbler, right?

But nope. I was flat-out wrong. The eye ring does look complete to my eyes, and the entire hood gray. I’ve taken lots of photos of fall Mourning Warblers at my bird bath over the years, and every one of them who had eye rings at all showed a more significant break in them than this bird. But yeah—there is a tiny part close to the bill that isn’t quite so clearly white.

Both species have long undertail coverts, but they’re supposed to almost reach the tail tip in Connecticut Warbler as Bob noted. My photos didn’t show the undertail perfectly, but it was clear that the coverts ended noticeably before the tail tip.

And there’s a subtle but real difference in overall body shape that was consistent with my first impression until I got too bogged down with field marks.

I’m of course embarrassed that I got it wrong, especially because I’d posted it publicly, not just on Flickr but on eBird and my blog and podcast. But the one thing I hate even more than making a mistake is not fixing a mistake as quickly as possible. The moment I realized Bob was right, I edited my eBird checklist and added Bob’s comments, and then made the tag and title corrections on Flickr. Ryan Brady sent me two of his own eBird checklists with correctly identified Connecticut Warblers documented with photos to compare with mine. (Ryan Brady’s checklists from September 21, 2023 and August 20, 2021)

When it comes to my work, correcting the record is extremely important to me, so I’m very grateful that people like Bob Mulvihill, when they notice an error, find a way to inform me in a straightforward way without a trace of snark, reminding me that we birders aren’t supposed to be like barnyard chickens, ridiculing and attacking one another to establish a pecking order. Birders and, really, everyone else are at our best when we act like chickadees, working together to keep our whole flock safe and successful. We’re all in this together.