Monday, January 7, 2008

Shame on You: cover your head in ashes

I received a shocking Flickr email this morning.



As usual, I power up my laptop the first thing I wake up just about every morning! When this popped up;







I was a bit agitated at first...composed myself, you know making myself a nice Alicafe 3 in 1 coffee, and lit up my cigarette. Took a few puffs and asked myself why does this guy so pist off? So I kept on reading and trying to comprehen the situation.



Wait a minute! This is the guy from Field Guide: Birds of the World. No wonder he's so angry. I incorrectly tagged the rail as Slaty-brested Rail(of course I corrected it already!). I was already informed by a friend quite in an urgent manner a few weeks back;





My mistake was, I simply didn't change it when I should! It was a misleading information, and obviously unacceptable. I was ashame and rightly so I guessed. Despite my embarasment, I put aside my ego and send him a reply;







On top of that, I also asked a favor from him to identify two of the recent birds I captured on camera.(identified by Horuku but aren't finalised by)Within a few hours, I received this;







Well, the so called "bad start of day" isn't bad after all! I said I want to improve myself and have to leave behind some bad habits...specially EGO...which I did in this particular day. A great reply from Cuckooroller boost my morale...for I believe, we should learn the hard way. Never will I let ego, ignorance and negligence stands between me and what I wanna be...

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Jordan,

Hopefully I did not crush your "ego" too much about the Rail ID. That was not my intent. I was only displeased because in this case the ID of this bird, in Sabah, is an important ID. There are no documented records for this bird in Borneo (and by calendar date, yours could have been the first had it been identified correctly and submitted to somebody like me for confirmation). So, really, I was displeased for you, and for the missed opportunity!

In any case, a fine capture of an almost unknown bird for Borneo.

Jordan Sitorus said...

Steve
no problem,my bad really. Jason(a.k.a Horukuru), the local birder/guide informed me the importance of the ID in Sabah but I failed to comply with his request to change the tag. However, as you can see in my previous posts, I promised not to publish unconfirmed ID of birds I photographed to my flickr.'Lucky' for me, you caught me napping! It's an honor to have someone like you to right me when I'm wrong. Thank you very much!

Wong Chor Mun said...

Hi Jordan,
I do recall about news of the Buff-Banded Rail that was being posted in some photos and bird forum.. It was a big bang then cause so far indeed we indeed have up to then we yet to have a concrete documented sighting of such in Malaysia.. Those later fieldguides that we use normally have no such plate to match that photos I recall.. except one waterbird field guides that I just stock up have a palate that match it..

Anyway birding is a life long hobby.. We makes a number of mistakes and learn alot along the way..

cheers,