Birding in the American West: a Handbook
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some readers may remember a book entitled The Western Birdwatcher, by the same author and published in 1985.For some reason that book never made it "big," but it was regarded by many as a very useful work.Birding in the American West (hereafter BAW) is essentially an updated and expanded version of The Western Birdwatcher, and I hope it reaches a larger market, for it contains much of value.The geographic scope of BAW is vast and comprises the "western" United States from the eastern boundaries of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas westward, including Alaska.Canada is not included, so the title is a political misnomer.BAW comprises five chapters, plus a single appendix, a bibliography, and an index.Chapter 1 is a concise discussion of techniques that can help in finding any bird species, not simply in the West.These include habitat recognition, elevation, key plant species, seasonality, time of day, bird hotlines, recommendations for pelagic trips, taping, and ethics.Chapter 2 overviews subjects that help in field identification, including structure and behavior, molt and plumage, vocalizations, the importance of preparation, and the dangers of psychological influences--how to recognize the "I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it" syndrome.A summary of key characters for different groups (shearwaters, kingbirds, vireos, etc.) is provided, with subjective judgment of the degree of identification difficulty within each group.Chapter 3 is a short discussion of why one should keep a journal, with suggestions for format and tips on how not to fall behind in keeping notes.Chapter 4 covers a selection of "difficult identifications beyond the field guides," and Chapter 5 suggests where and when to find a selection of what the author terms "western specialties," ranging from resident breeding species to rare migrants and vagrants.I recommend the first three chapters to all birders.Certain points will be obvious to
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.067 | 0.040 |
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".