Vagrant and extra-limital bird records accepted by the Birds New Zealand Records Appraisal Committee 2023–2024
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We report Records Appraisal Committee (RAC) decisions regarding Unusual Bird Reports received between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2024. Among the 195 submissions accepted by the RAC were the first New Zealand records of Horsfield’s bronze-cuckoo (Chrysococcyx basalis), MacGillivray’s prion (Pachyptila macgillivrayi), and the Asian subspecies of gull-billed tern (Gelochelidon nilotica affinis). We also report the second accepted records of stilt sandpiper (Calidris himantopus), Bulwer’s petrel (Bulweria bulwerii), and dusky woodswallow (Artamus personatus), the third accepted sighting of northern pintail (Anas acuta), and the second and third accepted records of streaked shearwater (Calonectris leucomelas). Other notable records included the first records of Kermadec petrel (Pterodroma neglecta) and brown booby (Sula leucogaster) at Rēkohu/Wharekauri/Chatham Islands, plumed whistling duck (Dendrocygna eytoni) at the Snares Islands/Tini Heke, Canada goose (Branta canadensis) and black shag (Phalacrocorax car
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.033 | 0.016 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".