Assessing and modelling abundance from animal count data is a very common task in ecology and management. Detection is arguably never perfect, but modern hierarchical models can incorporate detection probability and yield abundance estimates that are corrected for imperfect detection. Two variants of these models rely on counts of unmarked individuals, or territories, (binomial N‐mixture models, or binmix) and on detection histories based on territory mapping data (multinomial N‐mixture models or multimix). However, calibration studies...