[openknot]

There is nothing wrong at all with the segments of the article you quoted. The main premise presented in the article is that electrocuted birds are a plausible cause of wildfires, in addition to human activity (the article specifically reports that human activity is the primary cause of wildfires).

The authors' methodology to find online reports was valid. They used alerts to collect online published reports of electrocuted birds, and then manually checked each report to discard any that were speculative or lacked hard evidence. After this, the authors found 44 reports of electrocuted birds causing wildfires. At most, your strongest critique is that the methods could have been more comprehensive to find additional reports. That is technically correct, but it doesn't invalidate the main premise that wildfires caused by birds do happen, and are not one-off phenomena (via the 44 reports from the described method).

>"and then they quote a guy who "has studied" it in Spain but wasn't involved with this."

It is responsible and encouraged behavior to quote someone who wasn't involved with the study. This avoids bias where the only interviewed people are affiliated with the study, and are more likely to talk it up. Interviewing uninvolved experts in the field opens the door to possible critiques.

>"Then they quote two other studies from four years ago."

Four years isn't inherently long ago enough to be irrelevant. This is especially true when the premise is that electrocuted birds have been a significant cause of wildfires, not just one-off occurrences.

[UIUC_06]

Oh, come off it. This might be respectable as a high school science project. "What percentage of forest fires were caused by birds?" would be one question I'd expect to see answered.

Their reports were from five years ago and covered a four-year period. They did some half-hearted Google searching, and ignored, say, [1] and [2], from agencies with a vested interest in investigating the causes of fires, or the Audobon Society [3], which of course is interested in birds and transmission lines.

[1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/search?k=fires

[2] https://www.pge.com/en_US/search/search-results.page?%26quer...

[3] https://www.audubon.org/news/transmission-lines-and-birds

[openknot]

You sound like someone involved in the field. If this is the case, I may see where you're coming from in terms of arguing for perfectionism, thoroughness, and notability.

However, as someone unfamiliar about the issue, the subject is still notable and interesting enough to warrant coverage in a news article. None of the information was wrong, and the article's headline only set the expectation to support the premise that 'electrocuted birds are sparking wildfires.' Plenty of users thought the article was notable enough to vote for it to appear on the front page of HN. There was nothing incorrect or unethical about the article to warrant the argument that this is an example of irresponsible reporting.

Suitably, the paper was published in the peer-reviewed "Wildlife Society Bulletin" journal, far less prestigious than Nature or Science. The news article was published in Science's news section, and wasn't a cover story or feature of the Scientific American or The New Yorker. Nothing about the work claimed to be a comprehensive treatise of the subject.

Instead of harshly criticizing the news article or paper (which presented valid data collected in a reasonable way), you could instead use your energy and expertise to either publish a better study in a more prestigious journal to add to your publication count if you're an academic, or get paid by freelancing a more in-depth article for the Scientific American or The Atlantic/equivalent magazine if you're a writer.

[UIUC_06]

Going for my credentials! Smooth move.

"Birds cause some fires" is a conclusion you can find with a minimal search on Google Scholar. It's been documented before. That seems to be the only contribution of this paper.

This was voted onto the front page of Hacker News. That was a mistake. End of story.