I barely post on Tw*tter these days, but new paper published today with, and led by, Simon, looking at transmission pathways of HPAI.

Fun day moping around the Cairngorms with dramatic scenery, pleasant weather and some fat snowball-like birds for company.

But there is no reason Plume-toed can't reach and fly around these higher elevations, so records should only be accepted (in our view) if birds are photographed at nest. In all, of the 766 records in eBird today, I'd say only a handful are admissible

So what does this mean for registered records? Some bad news! All the Crocker birds look to us to be Plume-toed, as do all lower-elevation birds on Kinabalu. Lots of records to be scrapped.

Oft-mentioned differences in gloss shade are, in the field, probably useless. We also find possible bioacoustic differences, but the sample size is so small that we are cautious in them being overinterpreted until more data are collected.

Yes! Well, almost certainly yes. In addition to being considerably smaller (difficult to determine in the field), Bornean Swiftlet is duller, best shown by a comparative lack of contrast between the face and crown, and is also subtly different in breast pattern (details in paper)

Almost all these records are from various elevations of Mt Kinabalu, and increasingly the Crocker Range. We reviewed the five specimens of Bornean Swiftlet (all from Kinabalu) and compared to those of Plume-toed. So can Bornean be identified?

Literature often claims Bornean Swiftlet to be inseparable from Bornean pops of Plume-toed Swiftlet (with which it overlaps), but despite this there is an intriguing number of accepted records of Bornean Swiftlet on eBird/ML

Citizen science is awesome! And, with the review systems in place on platforms like @Team_eBird, is pretty accurate. But with some taxonomic groups, it is inevitable there are problems. We highlight this using one of the trickiest: Bornean Swiftlet Collocalia dodgei.