Thanks Peter,
That is exactly correct. I am the other Philip (“that poster was suggesting”) who raised that point. My point being, yes of course I hope there are Night Parrots there. But before we get excited about jumping on nocturnal graders and scouting for Night Parrots, I would wish to be confident there is some basis to think that the birds being seen aren’t some other parrot species, or even pratincoles, quails or god knows what, that happen to be birds roosting on the ground at night. I don’t know the birding credentials of the grader driver or how easy it is to identify birds in those conditions. Knowing the sort of misidentifications that non birders and even some of us, come up with (we all must know stories), my guess is: that he is flushing birds at night and is aware of the name “night parrot” and largely on that basis, says ahah I’m seeing Night Parrots. That is why I want to know what other species this guy is flushing at night. There must be other species flushed too. On the basis of what other birds would be there, I am certain if all or most are things he sees, he claims as “night parrots” well that simply is not credible. So are any? If some truly are, well that is good news. How often do you hear people referring to Chimpanzees as “monkeys” or dubbing of sounds of Chimpanzees with footage of monkeys. Even with our closest relatives, people make wording mistakes.
Thus I say absolutely that the difference between the two spellings Night Parrot / night parrot and same for Ground Parrot / ground parrot etc, is immense and I dispute that the thread of capitalisation is either mundane or useless. Although it is repetitive. Misidentifications based on perceptions from the name are common. We had the interesting case of the “Square-tailed Black Kite” that was a Little Eagle, I believe the thought process was this: likely there were many Black Kites there and he identified them. Here was a similar but different bird and the most obviously different feature was the square tail. On that feature and the name he made a wrong guess of Square-tailed Kite. The error was surely more due to the name than misreading the field signs (because it was nothing like a Square-tailed Kite and the evidence it was a Little Eagle was clear in the photo). There was also the young Gannets called great shearwaters, probably a similar tale. Also the one about the Masked Gnatcatcher identified as “blue fairy wren”. Anyone who doesn’t know birds or bird names would be perfectly valid to identify a courting pair of Wedge-tailed Eagles with their looping flights as “skylarks”, as that is what they are doing, but they are not Skylarks. It is by understanding the processes by which people reach right or wrong identifications that we advance. More than just saying this is a XXXX. As it is also about communications, (maybe sadly) spelling and such is important.
Besides, the ideas about foreign language bird names is actually interesting too. I am just one, and other people think differently, but discussions about issues affecting the science of bird watching is in general far more interesting to me, than that person x has seen bird y at place z.
As for suggestions of bullying. I don’t see it and I am sure it is unintentional if it happens in these contexts. Telling someone they have spelt something wrong is simply (usually hopefully) helping them in the learning process.
Philip
