Documented Winter Records of Swainson's Thrush in Usa and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Part of the documentation for an "out-of-season" bird may be its being banded by a reputable bander.Since banding data often contribute to patterns of change in bird distribution, it might be advantageous to leave unverified records in the Bird Banding Laboratory's data base with a code indicating that the record h•,s not been verified and should be used with caution.Thus, this unverified data would remain available should subsequent data indicate a trend.An example is the following banding of an out-ofseason SwainSon's Thrush (Catharus ustulatus).On 11 November 1988, I noticed athrush frequenting a small patch of grass and weeds in a corner of my property.Upon closer inspection, my husband, Roger, and I found the bird had a continuous olivebrown back and tail, no rusty, ruling out Hermit Thrush (C.guttatus).It had a buffy throat, upper breast and cheek, with a wide eye ring and large breast spots, ruling out the Gray-cheeked Thrush (C.fuscescens)and Veery (C.minimus).Although identification was never really in question, these details confirmed its identity as a Swainso n's Thrush Early the next morning, the bird was banded with USFW band #1221-13277.Upon examination, we found the 7th and 8th primary emarginated, thus reinforcing our sight identification of the previous day.Crown and back had buffy streaks with terminal spots on the feathers, and the retained juvenal coverts made it a hatching-year bird, sex unknown (Anon.North American Bird Banding .Manual,1986).Temperature range on the day of banding was 58-74 o (14-23 o C).The bird repeated in my nets on 31 December 1988 and 4 January 1989, thereby documenting the fact that it stayed around the banding station for almost two months (first seen 11 Nov. 88,and banded 12 Nov.88).This was the 454th Swainson's Thrush banded by us in over 22 years of ba;rJing (Foy and Foy 1990), and is the ß first documented record of this species seen and handled in January in the U.S.A. and Canada (Foy and Foy 1990).DISCUSSION The normal winter range of the Swainson's Thrush is in central South America (Bent 1949; A.O.U.1983) with casual records to the Texas Gulf Coast (A.O.U.1983).Biom and Wilds (1984) stated, "There is no evidence for wintering by this species anywhere in North America."They also stated that they knew of no specimen or photographic evidence.Sight Records Nevertheless, in New York City between 1950 and 1964, Bull (1964) states "... there have been about a half dozen sight records in December and early January, nearly all by reliable and experienced observers and, in several instances, by three or A sincere thank you to Dr. Martin McNicholl for a critical reading and constructive suggestions to improve this manuscript.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".