Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Wandering Tattler

My habit every morning is to check my status on the Internet site eBird.  This morning when I looked I saw to my great surprise that my most recent addition from the day before was supposedly a “Wandering Tattler”.  What the heck, I thought, has someone hacked by account?  Oh, I get it, a little joke, not the Cascade Rambler, but the Wandering Tattler.  I yelled for Jeanette, we began brainstorming on who would do such a thing.  The list is pretty short, I only know two people on eBird.  The duties of the morning took me away from the computer, and it was after lunch before I got back to the problem.  First order of business, contact eBird and see who did it.  Then I remembered that eBird had sent out a warning notice last week that August was when they review all the names of birds and because some names change we should all be looking at our bird list. Relieved, I explained to Jeanette the probable answer.  So then the question was what bird had its name changed?  I closely checked the computer trip list against my paper list and discovered that the missing bird on the computerized eBird list was a Western Tanager. Oh, did Western Tanager get changed to Wandering Tattler.  I pulled up the form that I use to fill in my sightings, scrolled down the list to “Tanager, Western”, it’s still there.  But just below on the next line I notice – “Tattler, Wandering”! Evidently when I entered my list on the day before I had clicked on the wrong line, so nobody hacked my account, nobody is trying to call me a Wandering Tattler; I’m still the Cascade Rambler.

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