“You know when I said I knew little about love? That wasn’t true. I know a lot about love. I’ve seen it, centuries and centuries of it, and it was the only thing that made watching your world bearable. All those wars. Pain, lies, hate… It made me want to turn away and never look down again. But when I see the way that mankind loves… You could search to the furthest reaches of the universe and never find anything more beautiful. So yes, I know that love is unconditional. But I also know that it can be unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, unbearable and strangely easy to mistake for loathing.”
Heh. I can tell already this answer will get long, so in deference to the dashes of unfortunates who aren’t obsessed with birds, here’s a cut.
Absolutely no need to apologize. A bird question from you is the high point of my day.
You don’t need to report subspecies. I believe eBird asks that if you do report subspecies you do so on the basis of observed (or heard) characteristics that identify the bird’s subspecies, rather than simply doing so based on the location where you saw it. Since the location where you saw it is already recorded as part of the observation they have that already. Rather than separately identifying such birds with an explicit subspecies designation that you didn’t visually confirm, you can just leave them ID’d to the species level, and anyone using your data for research can draw their own conclusions as to subspecies.
If you want to get really persnickety you can put separate entries in your checklist for species, and for separate subspecies of that species, all in the same list. I do that sometimes with yellow-rumped warblers, where both the myrtle and Audubon’s subspecies occur around here. So I’ll sometimes have a list with, like, 5 YRWA, 3 YRWA (Audubon’s), 1 YRWA (Myrtle), where the undifferentiated ones are birds I didn’t see or hear well enough to know which subspecies they were.
I confess I’ve never paid much attention to Steller’s jay subspecies until now. It turns out there are a LOT of subspecies of those. 🙂 North of Mexico they tend to get lumped into two “groups”, the coastal group and the interior group, which eBird offers as possible IDs.
Looking at eBird data, I don’t see records for interior group birds in (most parts of) California; they seem to be reported more inland.
I went back and looked through my own photos of Steller’s jays and had fun putting my newfound interior/coastal group knowledge to the test.
Here’s a coastal group bird I saw at La Cumbre Peak above Santa Barbara:
Here’s an interior group bird I saw on Mount Lemmon in Arizona:
I was curious whether Mammoth Lakes in the Eastern Sierra would have coastal or interior birds. At least for the ones I’ve photographed, all appeared to be coastal group, including this one:
Home is behind, the world ahead. And there are many paths to tread. Through shadows to the edge of night. Until the stars are all alight. Then world behind and home ahead. We’ll wander back and home to bed. Mist and twilight, cloud and shade, Away shall fade! Away shall fade!
My social media is always me, except for Facebook sometimes when Dan Guy, the neilgaiman.com webgoblin, puts things up, but he always signs them so nobody thinks it’s me.
Tumblr has, as far as I can ascertain, no PR or commercial advantages whatsoever, and after a decade of answering questions here, become a hobby, like crochet or beekeeping.
An interesting metric of how much I value your blog: how many posts in a row about something I’m not interested in I’m willing to scroll through in my dash.
CONGRATULATIONS Ariana Debose on being awarded Best Supporting Actress by the four major film award associations, effectively sweeping the 2022 award season
