Sorry Tyler but I have to argue your comment that submissions without 
exact numbers are useless. That would be like saying your opinion isn't 
valid because you didn't spell-check your email and get it perfectly 
correct. It's silly to think that either of those would be true. If the 
data was so detrimental to the health of the database I suspect EBird 
wouldn't allow 'x' submissions. While I agree exact numbers are vastly 
more valuable I can't imagine telling someone that their effort is 
useless if they don't have an exact count. It comes across negatively 
and is one more discouragement to keeping people interested in birding, 
and when I'm in a room full of local birders and am almost always the 
youngest person (I'm 34!) we should be encouraging anyone with an 
interest in our hobby (although I agree with you much more if this has 
become someone's new post-retirement "career"). Most of my lists do not 
have exact numbers, they are kept with the hundreds and hundreds of 
school kids visiting the farm each year who are introduced to birds on 
our hikes. I neither have the time for exact counts nor would the kids 
stay interested. While I'd love the keep them out for 4 hours counting 
birds it's not realistic, but them being able to visit EBird and see 
that their work was useful to the scientific community far outweighs the 
lack of exact numbers. When I'm retired I'll have time to keep exact 
numbers, until then I'll ask for a little slack and do what I can.

Good birding,
Chris Ordiway
Hard Bargain Farm
Accokeek, MD


James Tyler Bell wrote:
> Also, there are lots of people who submit sightings and don't properly quantitate the number of each species seen. They use X to mean they saw them but don't know how many. This is useless information for the over health of the database. It would actually be better to not check the box at all. If you look at submissions by people like Bob Ringler, there are always exact numbers for each species. Kudos to those people who do it rigth! Once you start keeping lists with this in mind, it becomes second nature.
> Tyler Bell
> 
> California, Maryland
>