Birding with Kenn and Kimberly

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: No, this isn't another post about a gig with our band. This is just to update a couple of points from yesterday's post about our "Puzzled By Birds" quiz. In introducing the quiz, we mentioned a similar (but faster!) bird quiz available for iPods and iPhones, but we made a couple of errors. For one, we got the capitalization of the company wrong: it's birdJam, not BirdJam (small b, capital j). Capitalization is important -- just ask the Yellow-crowned Night-Heron, who would be vexed constantly by the many incorrect printings of his name, if only he could read! Secondly, we mentioned that we thought that our friends at that company had gotten the idea for their new "birdJam Twitch" game from our quiz back in January, but they didn't; they had come up with the idea independently. Great minds running on the same tracks (or flying in the same flocks), you know. We don't have any connection with birdJam; we just kno...

From Birding Central, Kenn writes: Back when "publishing" always involved ink and paper, a Photo Quiz was popular in various bird magazines. A challenging photo (or two or three) would be presented in one issue of the magazine, with the answer(s) to be revealed in the next issue. Birders would study the photos and their field guides, discuss the quiz with their pals, then wait a month or two or three for the next issue to see if they’d gotten the answer right. Today, in the age of online publishing, photo quizzes are legion. There are literally dozens of "mystery bird" photos posted every week on websites and blogs. Followers of these quizzes wait only days for the answers, not weeks or months. Other things have changed as well: birders researching a tricky photo today are more likely to look for pictures on the internet, and a fair percentage of those online photos will be misidentified or mislabelled. And when the online quiz posts its answer, there’s a chance th...