JP48

To add a little to the hearing aid reference - I too had some older hearing aids (Starkey, behind the ear), which I quit using because they were falling apart and it was very difficult to use them with a mask during COVID. Eventually I re-visited my Audiologist, and ended up with a very expensive pair of Phonaks (also behind-the ear), which have a second program that amplifies the higher frequencies that I can turn on when birding. Whole new world out there. I'm still not too sure about directionality, though.

This bird doesn't seem to be referenced in iBird. Not the first time this has happened, nor the 2nd, nor the 3rd etc, Most often it's when the bird is some rare off-coast migrant, or a Hawaiian endemic, though. This one, according to Wikipedia, isn't all that rare, in the Southwest and in Mexico. Never heard of it, myself. I don't know where BRDL gets its codes to choose from, but I do have to use the full world list to solve it sometimes.

Possibly Bob Collins?

I have a pair of the Vortex 10x42. I've used them hard for several years, and for me they're fine. Of course, I use Vortex for everything (2 scopes, a monocular, my wife's binos, even our son has Vortex binos). I also have an old pair of Diamondbacks, which I did once send in for repair, and that worked out well, except that I ended up dropping them again and eventually replaced them with the Vipers. I don't know much about the other brands, except that many of the birders around me use Kowa scopes, which appear to be excellent.

Those would be huge numbers for my whole state.

Weird happening today. When I did the puzzle this morning, I was having trouble with, and ended up finding a different banding code on iBird from what I found on the list of world codes (I don't ever use this, but I was stuck). I mentioned this to another birder, and when he did the puzzle after noon he came up with a totally different bird. I didn't expect that.

Sounds like a Northern Cardinal to me.

I chopped this from a page of protocols for a program we have in my state. I think it agrees with other responses here to this topic, but I don't know it it's any sort of official policy for eBird. It seems like a good general rule of thumb to use, though. Does my landowner-partner ‘count’ when considering ‘Number of Observers”? This depends on whether or not they are an ‘active observer’, i.e. pointing out birds that you may have overlooked, drawing your attention to singing or calling birds, identifying the birds that they are familiar with. If this is the case, you would include the landowner in the “Number of Observers”. If they are along for the ride, and you are pointing out birds to them, they would not be included in this number.

In my experience, Thrashers normally repeat phrases twice, while Mockingbirds repeat 3 or more times. Also, Mockingbirds are known to sing all night. I would call that a NOMO.

I'm not sure what devices it might work on (I've used it on an iPad), but there's an app called Larkwire which is OK. They just put out a version which does visual ids also, but from what I've seen that is for beginners. I haven't tried the sound id on the new version.

I have a question (since this thread has devolved from it's original purpose}. In Vermont we have a fairly long-standing email group for birders. We also have what I think is a fairly recently established Facebook group. The use of the email group seems to be slowly fading, while the use of the Facebook group seems to be growing. I have personally never used Facebook, so I can't really speak to how that works for the users of this group, but my sense is that it hits only a smallish segment of the birders in the area, though I suspect it is used by beginning and casual birders (which is good), while the email group is mainly used by more dedicated birders. The question is whether people would be more likely to use a local, bird-specific chat board such as this one (Whatbird), especially would it be likely to draw a diverse (age-wise, experience-wise) as opposed to the email or Facebook platforms.

I've just done a little searching, and as far as I can see there is no regional filter for Sleuth. The only reference I saw is that it uses a database of 942 species. I'm curious . What are you seeing?

Out of curiosity, are any of you using a VPN? I've been finding recently that there are sites (not this one, that I remember) that I have occasional trouble getting into, but the problem disappears when I turn off the VPN

You're on the right track. Assuming you have the pictures somewhere on your computer, after you click on add file you should be able to find the picture in File Explorer, then select it.