David Vander Pluym

Joined: Sep 5, 2016 Last Active: Oct 2, 2024 iNaturalist

Ornithologist (Arizona BRC member 2014-2017, 2019-2022) currently a PhD student at LSU. Also on the NACC early career systematics group. Used to live along the Colorado River in western Arizona where I was working with Elf Owls. I also have an interest in Mexican Ducks and Mallard hybrids and have presented my research on this. As well as birds have an interest in herps, mammals, and developing an interest in insects and spiders. I plan on trying to upload as many of my random photo collection of non birds as possible. I have traveled widely in North America as well as some in South America, Antarctica, Australia, Turkey, and Hawaii. All bird photos are also uploaded to eBird.

A note on bird subspecies. I generally do not identify birds to subspecies, unless they are field identifiable and there has been recent work on them. Typically I asked myself if this was split to species would I identify it as such. I do this because a lot of bird subspecies were based on little material originally and likely are not valid or are simply not field identifiable. Identifying it to subspecies based on location doesn't add much in the way of information to the sighting and more often causes confusion and misinformation.

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