Thread by @N8Swick

Facebook tells me today is the 10yr anniversary of an incident that has become a folk legend in some circles of the birding world.

It's known as Swallowgate & involves the forensic analysis of a fraudulent rare bird report made by a well-known (at the time) young naturalist 🧵

I was in the middle of it. And 10 years on I feel like the statute of limitations has passed such that I can tell the story freely, with the name of the perpetrator still redacted. He's still an active naturalist, though not really a birder.

I considered the observer a friend and a mentee, as did many in the NC birding community. So it stung at the time and still does a bit. I often wonder what would have happen had I noticed the red flags earlier and quietly put the genie back in the bottle.

I'm not interested in demonizing them, though the lessons to take about being a bit too lenient w/ younger birders because we don't want them to slip away, are relevant.

It may also explain why rare bird reports are met with the sort of skepticism that can put some off.

I'll share photos we used to prove the sighting was a hoax, and the gist of the document I created arguing the case to the Bird Records Committee.

This is a story I have previously only told people in person. Usually over a couple beers.

So buckle up, I guess. It's kinda long.

On 10/1/2011 I was at home late in the day and got a message that a Violet-green Swallow was discovered by a friend at a small nothing pond about 5 mins from my house.

I did what any birder would do. Negotiated w/ my wife (we had a toddler) grabbed bins/keys and bolted.

When I got there (after an interminable red light), I found my friend sitting by the pond looking at his laptop. Said the bird was gone. I'd just missed it. Here's a photo I took.

No doubt about it. Violet-green Swallow. A state 1st.

Maybe this should have been a red flag. Maybe I should have realized how weird it was that only a few minutes after the bird had left he didn't try to refind it, but immediately sat down to download the single photo.

But I was ticked I'd missed it & could only think about that.

Later that evening he uploaded the photo to flickr and linked to it on Facebook. Likes and comments rolled in.

I was one of the first to comment (something like "Great find! Nailed it!), so I got a notification every time someone else did.

Another local birder, Kent Fiala, who ran the state bird club web site downloaded the flickr image in the hopes of being able to use it on the site.

He noted some discrepancies in the EXIF, the metadata attached to the photo that tells you when, precisely, the photo was taken.

That EXIF placed the photo as taken in earlier that year, when the observer was known to be in Colorado.

Kent commented on the post asking about the date. The observer quickly deleted this comment. But I saw it because I got the notifications.

I didn't think much of it. I trusted the observer and I was proud of him for the find.

Kent eventually shared with me that in a backchannel email, the observer gave him an excuse that sounded pretty wild but since Kent didn't know a ton about EXIF, he let it go. We all did.

Because of the photo, the observation was unanimously accepted by the Bird Records Committee, and Violet-green Swallow was added to the NC list.

The observer now had a little bit of notoriety for finding a state 1st and started finding plenty of good birds, many with photos.

Like the Violet-green Swallow, many were rare but not unexpectedly so. VGSW was long-overdue for the state.

They would find rare birds in places and at times that were entirely reasonable. A pattern that is not unusual for many skilled birders.

So it was with only a little bit of frustration that many of their sightings were single observer. But w/ photos!

A year or so later, they decided to do a North Carolina Big Year with a goal to break the state record.

This is where things started getting weird.

Hold on, give me a sec. Something else came up.

Alright, so during this Big Year a lot of weird stories started coming in from all over the state. The observer claiming to be places where they weren't seen. Timetables that seemed impossible without a DeLorean.

It all culminated in the last month of the year when the observer headed off to Florida a handful of birds short of the record, coming back in the last couple days of the year and closing the gap miraculously.

Eyebrows, unsurprisingly, were raised.

So when this all happened, I started thinking about that swallow. All the red flags I'd missed. And I started chatting with my friends John Puschock and Nathan Goldberg about it all.

I was convinced that the swallow was a fraud, but I needed a way to prove it.

So I started looking into EXIF. If your camera's date/time is set correctly, then the EXIF will be correct.

If it's not set correctly, the EXIF can be pretty much anything. I needed to establish that the observer's camera had been set correctly when the swallow was seen.

I found other photos that the observer had taken at dates that were known to me. The EXIF data matched.

I found one from before the swallow observation and one after. This suggests that the camera was set correctly when the swallow was reportedly observed.

I emailed Kent and asked him if he remembered the exchange that had been deleted when the bird was reported.

He did! He thought it was as weird as I had, but didn't think anyone else saw it.

He shared with me the email the observer had sent explaining the discrepancy.

As I mentioned above, the explanation was pretty out there. Something about how the photo did not have EXIF and so it was next to some files from Colorado so when the photo was transferred the EXIF from Colorado somehow attached itself to the swallow photo.

I didn't know much about EXIF, but I thought that sounded impossible.

I asked a handful of my very good photographer friends about this and they all confirmed that it was nonsense.

So I'm pretty sure now that the photo was not taken in Oct in NC, but when was it taken?

So John suggests that there might be something in the bird's molt that might help us place the time of year that the photo was taken.

So we start digging into every bird book we can find, because most North American guides don't talk about this much.

We find the answer in Howell and Webb's Guide to Birds of Mexico and Central America which says of Violet-green Swallow, "tertials broadly edged in white when fresh".

This is the aha moment.

Swallows undergo a complete molt once a year in late summer post-breeding.

So a bird seen in Oct is going to be in its freshest plumage of the year. Its tertials will be broadly edged in white.

This turns out to be true for all Tachycineta swallows.

The NC bird? No white.

We needed to prove that this wasn't an abnormal bird. That every VGSW in September and October has white edged tertial.

So I dig into Flickr and find all the VGSW I can from fall. This is before eBird made this step super easy.

Guess what I find. White.

Every one. White.

Seriously. Every goddam one.

And if that wasn't enough? We went to friends at museums and asked them. They found birds from nearly 100 years ago.

White tertials.

So this bird was not photographed in fall. Couldn't have been. By spring those white edges have worn off and the bird is sleek and clean.

Like the bird in the photo.

I want to find exactly where the bird was photographed because I need an airtight case. It's not a small accusation I'm making.

So I dig into their Facebook profile and find a photo gallery of swallows taken in Colorado.

Left bird is CO. Right is NC.

Notice anything?

The lighting. The water. The fact that swallows frequently flock together. Seems like I found it.

So one more thing happens in the middle of all this.

The observer changes their camera settings. The EXIF on the photos starts getting wonky. It doesn't match real life.

So I suspect that they reset their camera after Kent made the initial observation on Facebook.

I was able to confirm this when I saw the observer at a Northern Lapwing twitch in February of 2013.

He took photos of the lapwing and posted them on the Carolina Bird Club website. But the EXIF was all kinds of screwy.

I did the math and found out it was off by 1397 days.

During this time the observer had reported a Magnificent Frigatebird in the area and submitted a photo.

I chased this bird. And I missed it. As did many people. Spent several hours looking for it.

But I took a look at the EXIF and found the date was off by 1419 days. Weird.

What's the deal with that 22 day discrepancy, I wondered.

So I went to their Facebook profile and found out that 22 days earlier they had been in Galveston, Texas.

Then I went to eBird on a hunch, and reader, what do you think I found exactly 22 days earlier?

So I confront them and, after a bit of squirming, they cop to it.

I submit my findings to the Bird Records Committee and we, with no small amount of sadness and frustration, rescind the record.

The observer sort of drops out if the birding community.

I gave them the opportunity to publicly apologize. I would have forgiven them.

I don't say this to make myself look saintly, only to share that this whole thing, even with all the neat stuff I learned about EXIF and swallow molt, pretty much sucked.

Well, I wouldn't have forgiven them immediately. The lying was pretty low.

But they were young and ambitious and, honestly, good enough at faking bird records to get away with it.

If they hadn't done the Big Year, they might still be getting away with it.

There's some epilogue to the story that is shocking and kind of sad. By all accounts the observer is living a quiet, relatively rustic, life keeping bees and good on him, honestly.

I still can't figure out exactly why they did it. The birding community is small potatoes and notoriety in it doesn't mean a whole lot even for the relatively well known. It is sort of nice to be thought of as an expert, I suppose. Some people are just impatient for that.

One last bit.

Because I knew the span of days between their EXIF and reality, I was able to find their camera's instruction manual online and find the date it turns to when you reset the settings.

Using this, I could find the exact date they panicked and reset their camera.

It was the day after Kent first confronted him on Facebook.

The deleted comment. How it all started.

[FIN]

This got posted to the state listserv and I’m not super thrilled about that…