eBird Power User Files Formal Appeal After App Flags 'Impossible' Sequence of Shorebirds

The dried mud had ridged itself into a fingerprint across the confirm button of a phone held over the flats at 06:14, and Nora Beaulieu pressed it anyway, the way you press anything when the birds are still out there and the tide is going to turn.

Nora is what the local count calls a power user: 41 checklists from the same mudflat since spring, each annotated with wind and tide because she read somewhere that this makes a list look considered. That morning she logged fourteen shorebird species, dunlin, semipalmated plover, stilt sandpiper, white-rumped, western, pectoral, least, and the rest of the autumn parade.

The app's reply arrived before she reached the parking lot: This sequence of species may be improbable for this location.

Nora read it four times, then the fine print, which explained that the platform flags lists far outside those already accepted from the same location. The word improbable, she later wrote in her formal appeal, "implies a judgement about my eyes that the software has not made about anybody else's, and I would like it either withdrawn or given a reason."

She submitted the appeal at 09:48 with eleven attached items: a tide table, a wind log, six distant, backlit photographs of the kind that make every shorebird a silhouetted argument, and a paragraph explaining that an overnight onshore wind had compressed the outer flat's birds onto the strip of mud she happened to be standing on. One photograph appears to show a dunlin. The others appear to show weather.

Petra Evers, who speaks for the standards board with the confidence of a building inspector, weighed in Tuesday. "An appeal is not a rebuttal of arithmetic," she said. "The algorithm does not owe the observer a conversation. The observer owes the algorithm a reason, in writing, and preferably with a photograph of the bird in question rather than the general area in which the bird might plausibly have been."

Nora's photograph of the general area is now in the file.

Vera Iverson, who has tried every piece of birding advice published online simultaneously since March, has discovered that reporting the same flock twice, once left to right and once right to left, gets flagged for an entirely different reason. She has opened a second appeal. She would like it noted that she is following all recommendations.

The record has moved on. Vera Ortega, assembling the group's monthly update, entered Nora's fourteen species without annotation, because the summary table has no column for onshore wind. The reason the number exists is in Nora's appeal folder.

The flag stands, the appeal is open, and the fourteen species remain on Nora's own checklist. "They were there," she said, out on the flats. "I don't need the platform's permission for the tide. I would, however, like an explanation of the word improbable."