Okay. You’ve just spent a substantial chunk of your
life scouring the skies for birds, taking careful systematic counts of everything
you see. (For some of you, we’re talking
hundreds of hours spent in one place!) The daily forms for each count day are in
your possession, the data is submitted to HawkCount, and all the original paperwork
is filed away for safekeeping. Mission
accomplished! But wait! Just how “clean” is your data?
Most veteran hawkwatchers I know
pride themselves on the quality of their fieldwork. They’ve developed their ID skills after years
of practice, and putting a name with reliable ease to most every raptor they
see is something they have every right to be proud of. But at the end of the day, what happens to
all those paper forms with the tiny boxes of numbers they’ve scrawled all over
them? Does your hawkwatch have a procedure
for handling data? If it doesn’t, I
implore you think seriously whether it might need one.
I raise this issue now as the
end of spring hawkwatching season draws near, because I’ll admit I’m easily
impressed by the large stack of count sheets presently on my desk. After all, I worked hard to collect nearly
all of that data, and I try very hard to be a careful/conscientious
counter. But an integral part of the job
of counting hawks is to see that the data collected can actually be used, and
for this to happen, it must be correct! And for it to be correct, it must be checked through
thoroughly, line by line, to see that the paper forms are faithfully
transcribed electronically to HawkCount.
So these count sheets on my desk are not yet a finished product, despite appearances
to the contrary. I’ll admit that this is
possibly the least glamorous aspect of counting hawks I can imagine, but it’s of
paramount importance to the science side of it.
And I think it’s much too easy, especially in this age of nearly
realtime HawkCount posting, to come back at the end of the day and quickly bang
out the day’s results for all your eager fans waiting to see them and be done
with it. But after spending a full day
on the hill, you’re probably tired. You
can barely see straight! And now you’re
going to take aim with your mouse and cursor at more little boxes on your computer
screen and expect perfection. This is
unrealistic. I don’t care who you are, you’re
going to make mistakes! And this, too, is part of the job of counting
hawks.
So I’d like to make a special
request of you: if you don’t already, make a point to take as much pride in the
correctness of your data as you do in your skills at identifying birds. Whether you audit the data yourself at a
later time or designate someone willing (and able) to do it, just ensure that
it gets done. And if you must do it
yourself, try to approach it with fresh eyes rather than a mind clouded by
fatigue, which is why it’s almost always a bad idea to try to audit the data yourself
the very day it was collected.
My
personal ritual is to export the submitted data from HawkCount as an MS Excel
worksheet (ask your site coordinator to do this for you if you don’t have
direct access to your HawkCount profile), and then I’ll tote my laptop with me down
to a coffee shop that offers free wireless internet. In the midst of a caffeinated buzz while
wearing headphones to cloud out the surrounding din, I’ll step through the
spreadsheet on the computer cell-by-cell while tracing through the stack of
daily forms sitting before me with an index finger. (I imagine it might be entertaining
to watch me work!) My preference for coffee
shops with WiFi is twofold: a) it’s perfectly acceptable in many coffee shops
(e.g., Starbucks) for one person to spread out his paperwork and things all
over a table for several hours at a time and only order a few soy Café au laits,
and b) having internet access means I can correct errors on HawkCount as I
discover them, and also allows me to take breaks and screw off a little when my
eyes begin to glaze over. Admittedly, coffee
houses are not cheap in an absolute sense. But we’re not
talking about making them a daily habit.
We’re talking about spending $10 on your pleasure as an *investment* in
the quality of your count data, and this begins to look
especially cheap given the amount of time you’ve already invested in counting birds. (And if coffee is
not your thing, do what you can to make the job slightly more
pleasurable/rewarding if you find the task as monotonous as I do.)
So getting back on track: accurate
counts are at the core of what we do. Do what you possibly can to make sure they really count!
Good Hawkwatching,
Arthur
Arthur
