“Merlin for Me”
Bird identification in the social media age
Like all birders, I am driven by a desire to practice bird identification to the best of my ability. I’m no Martin Garner, and my birding career has seen its fair share of absolute howlers, but in the grand scheme of things I consider myself to be a reasonably competent bird identifier. Partly for this reason, I frequently respond to bird identification queries online, most commonly through the UK bird identification group on Facebook. The group’s premise is simple: members post photos (or sometimes sound recordings) of birds they have encountered but cannot identify, and ask other members of the group to help them out. For the most part, being a member of said group is a pleasurable experience: it is a rare space where my pedantry about bird identification is an asset rather than a source of cringe. And most of the time the group works well: members’ queries are usually answered efficiently and correctly.
However, the group suffers from the perennial problem of how to navigate incorrect, inaccurate or misleading information from group members. Not only that, if you spend much time on the site, it quickly becomes clear that inaccurate and misleading contributions are not random, but conform to regular and predictable patterns. For instance, incorrect responses usually involve just stating the name of a species, with no additional justification. When incorrect or misleading comments do mention a specific feature, they often fetishise one specific ID feature without looking at the bird in the round (e.g. the pale cheek spot of Linnet, or the “arrow-head” spots of Song Thursh). What is more, blurry photos of common birds invite a disproportionate volume of misleading comments: last week, for instance, multiple people insisted that a blurry photo of three Fieldfares in fact depicted Bramblings. By contrast, misleading comments tend to feature less prominently in response to clear photos of birds from difficult species pairs (such as Meadow/Tree Pipit or Marsh/Willow Tit). Furthermore, incorrect IDs also frequently arise from misinterpretations of single photographs, for instance by misinterpreting a photographic artefact as an actual physical feature.
The other common banana skin is the tendency to over-estimate the likelihood of scarcer birds, rather than defaulting to the common unless there’s solid evidence to the contrary, a phenomenon I have written about previously. That said, I don’t always take my own advice on this: on one particularly embarrassing occasion I misjudged the size and bulk of an unstreaked Acrocephalus warbler and excitedly talked up the possibility of Great Reed, before some more level-headed members put me right. Another iron rule of Facebook bird ID is that enquiries concerning raptors always invite a higher percentage of incorrect responses than those involving other bird families: almost every Sparrowhawk features at least one person claiming it’s a Goshawk (my suspicion is that this is partly down to there being lots of falconers in the group whose practical experience in handling birds of prey does not translate into a capacity to correctly identify wild raptors from photos). A final general rule is that formulations such as “Merlin for me” are more likely to be incorrect than those which decisively state “this is a Merlin”.
So what does one do in response to all these potential difficulties? One option is to leave, as many have done out of frustration with the prevalence of incorrect responses. Another is to laugh: there is a certain unintentional comedy to be gleaned from the mistakes and mishaps, which the (US-based) Facebook Bird Misidentification Page mercilessly skewers. But I’ve tried to choose a different tack: my pedantry about bird ID means I have no qualms about challenging inaccurate or misleading information. Perhaps I’m naïve, but I really do want, as best I can, to help people improve their knowledge of bird identification. I concede this results in some rather farcical situations, such as when I struggled to get to sleep one night because I was smarting over my inability to convince a retiree in Cambridgeshire that the corvid sp in her garden was merely a Carrion Crow and not a Raven. But, nevertheless, I persist.
Responses to my persistence vary: some are appreciative, others less so. Upon challenging incorrect IDs I have been accused, variously, of humourlessness, elitism and — on one occasion — snowflakery. As such, Facebook discussions about bird ID can quickly mirror the divisiveness and fractiousness typical of social media exchanges more broadly. As a political scientist by profession, I’m no stranger to this kind of fractiousness. But there is, I think, a fundamental difference between political disputes, and arguments about bird ID. The former are fundamentally unresolvable: there is no absolute, neutral benchmark that one could use to adjudicate between, say, socialism and conservatism. But with bird ID queries often there is: in most cases, it is possible to identify the subject bird with certainty. Consequently, apparent disagreements about a bird’s identity are often not really disagreements in a fundamental sense: usually, they merely reflect differing levels of ability to correctly identify the bird in question. Indeed, when incorrect IDs are challenged, a common response is to try to relativise things by saying that they are merely “offering an opinion”. In one particularly fractious exchange (which I was not directly involved in), one member announced his departure from the group after being challenged on his insistence that a Siskin on a garden feeder was in fact a Greenfinch. His protestations that he was being unfairly denigrated for putting forward what was “just an opinion” may have been legitimate had it been a political discussion. But he was objectively wrong: the subject bird was a Siskin, not a Greenfinch. But this one incident is simply a testament to the wider difficulties that confront bird identification in the social media age: ensuring a correct identification sometimes comes at the cost of generating conflict and bad feeling, and ensuring the site is accessible to all risks a situation in which the voices of genuine experts become diluted amidst a tsunami of misleading contributions from more causal bird enthusiasts.
Amidst this backdrop, I have become increasingly curious about incorrect responses to ID queries, and the demographics of those making them. It’s hard to ignore the fact that there is a specific type of group member who is disproportionately likely to both misidentify birds and respond negatively to being challenged. These serial misleaders are almost entirely men (women are, in general, much less likely to be defensive when challenged on a wrong ID) and tend to be in the 50–70 age range. They also cultivate a distinctive online aesthetic: profile pictures where the subject poses with a recently-caught fish are amazingly frequent, as are spitfires and other military insignia. Another astonishingly common quirk is their predilection for putting things like “University of Life” or “School of Hard Knocks” in their Facebook bios. When these guys are challenged on their incorrect IDs they usually don’t respond. When they do, they either become defensive, or they appeal to experiential rather than technical knowledge: i.e. they say things like “I used to see them all the time when I lived on the coast”, as opposed to, say, “its elegant, compact shape, long primary projection and lack of any contrast between the black upperparts and the black primaries render it a possible candidate for fuscus”. To put things crudely and polemically, the people who serially and unreflectively misidentify birds on Facebook are often white guys of a certain age who are likely unaccustomed to being corrected in their everyday lives and, perhaps thanks in part to the Dunning-Kruger effect, are strangers to self doubt.
This leads to a conclusion that may at first seem far-fetched: that something as innocuous as an apparent disagreement about the identity of a bird may in fact reflect deeper divisions in a social media-driven, post-Brexit Britain. The keen birders in the group try as best we can to offer insights based on our accumulated technical knowledge and expertise. But the site is also testament to the importance of more intangible skills that go beyond raw factual information: things like the capacity to make a judgement informed by an awareness of the relative probability of a particular species, or to weigh the significance of a photographic artefact. These kinds of expertise specific to keen birders sometimes collide with appeals to knowledge based more on feelings, emotion, or non-technical experience. This problem is compounded by the fact that the logic of social media tends to steer prople towards the latter at the expense of the former. Which is one reason I admit I get disproportionately irritated by comments such as “Merlin for me”: the statement seems to imply that its truth-value is down to an individual’s feelings, even if the subject bird is in fact a Sparrohawk, Kestrel, Hobby or Peregrine. Put crudely, in the age of social media, there’s a heightened risk that bird identification queries are derailed by overconfident mansplainers who say it’s a Merlin because they feel it to be so, but would be unable to identify a Dusky Warbler if it bit them on the arse.
The good news, however, is that there are certain principles which I try to adhere to precisely because they can stem the worst excesses of socially-mediated inexactitude. The first is that one should avoid getting involved unless we really know what we’re talking about or have something tangible of value to contribute: if I’m genuinely stumped (which, to be fair, I often am) then I don’t think it’s worth offering an uncertain or speculative contribution. Second, we should be honest and upfront when we make mistakes: instead of hiding away, we should say “yes, fair cop” when we screw up (as when I over-egged that Eurasian Reed Warbler). The often rather tiresome emphasis on “reputation” in the birding community can sometimes mean that people are reluctant to admit, or draw attention to, their mistakes, but it’s central to good birding practice. Third, we should, if at all possible, give reasons: i.e. don’t just say “Merlin” but explain why it’s a Merlin rather than, say, Peregrine, Kestrel etc. For to do so is to defend the final and most important principle, which is to unapologetically use and defend technical knowledge, experience and expertise. And if that means upsetting some folks on Facebook who think a Fieldfare is a Brambling, then so be it.
