NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

This is going to be a stream of me 'thinking out loud' with a large dollop of playing devil's advocate... Suppose that tomorrow morning I go out and find a singing male Sardinian Warbler on a bird reserve.  I tweet it out. Within a matter of minutes it is picked up by the information services and the news is disseminated by them. On the back of this a bird tour picks up on the news and they all come and have a look. Now, both the information services and tour company have used my information - without permission - to make money from it (by charging others to access it or by charging clients to be shown my bird via my information). Is that morally acceptable? Is it stealing information, without permission, for financial gain, or have I relinquished all control over my information by placing it in the public domain? And because I was on a bird reserve, albeit with permission, was it my place to tweet the information at all? Should I not have alerted the staff and allowed ...

I think it was Bill Oddie who advocated the practice of wringing birding mileage out of 'nothing'. The example he used (if it were indeed he) was the art of turning a perceived lack of data into bird report entries, such as 'No breeding Stonechats at Empty Common this year', or 'observer reports no spring passage of Whinchat at Boring Reservoir' and 'No Wood Sandpipers at Smelly Sewage Farm for the first time since 1957'. So, in light of nothing to talk about, let me present my very own post about - lack of data. So far this year I have not recorded a single Light Brown Apple Moth (Epiphyas postvittana). This is highly unusual in that over the past few years it has become one of my commoner winter moths. Am I facing a local extinction or a plummet in the local population? Has this lack of presence been noticed elsewhere? No data = data. As the Americans would say (and also our increasingly brainwashed youth), go figure...