Jonathmartinez

I tend to agree with John but also with HF Cheung. In my opinion a special section for beginners should be a good compromise. Same as Geoff I found this thread very attractive before I open it...
I also think that this special section should be limitee to HK birds or birds could occur in HK and same for the ID section to avoid very long series of post from people coming back from overseas trip and asking for ID of every bird they have seen there, in my opinion it did'nt bring usefull information in the matter of this forum.

Just a few thought.

All the best,

Jonathan

Jonathmartinez

Agree with Geoff that mention a Species even wrong is better than mechanical ID please...
I don't like to suggest idea as I really have no time to do it, but a nice one would be to write down a short guideline of how to ID birds before submit it for ID. Just to avoid the Mackinnon Chinese syndrome that make many chinese birders to take out all the text page from the book to only carry the plate that are for many species far to be usefull, and totally ignore that read the text is of importance to complete the ID.
As Geoff said, I often have the feeling that photographer send picture to know how to labelled them in their computer rather than try improve their knowledge and accuracy on bird ID.

About what Dylan said, there is really no shame on mis ID, as every birdwatcher had start birding one day and face the same problem than other for Identification.
ID birds from picture is a far more complicated excercice than seing them in the fied where many feature can not be reproduce on a pic... I also reguraly totally out...but everytime I learn.

All the best,

Jonathan