See: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9720798

see recent discussion thread started here:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/inaturalist/wJMHSUh8Whc/-VQObq6eAAAJ

which says

I've noticed this as a recurring issue that confuses some users, so I thought I would point this out. I don't know that displaying the NatureServe Conservation Status rankings for observations makes much sense, for a few reasons. First, those rankings only covering breeding status and don't make much sense during non-breeding season for migratory animals. Second, the criteria that NatureServe uses to identify the 'breeding range' of a species is quite liberal, especially for the periphery of breeding ranges. Within the U.S., NatureServe considers some states to be within the breeding range for species that only have a handful of historic breeding records in a state. In those cases, the species is listed as critically imperiled or possibly extirpated in those states, which is a bit confusing without the context.

Example I came upon today: Ring-billed Gull in Colorado. The iNat designation is CR, which it defines as 'possibly extinct' (I assume the word 'extinct' there is a typo, as it should be 'extirpated' to mirror the NatureServe designation - with 6,137 record in iNat I think we can rule them out as extinct!). As far as I was able to dig up, Colorado has documentation of a small colony of Ring-billed Gulls that nested there in the 1890s and nothing substantial since. Those records are enough for NatureServe to consider Colorado within breeding range for the species and thus ranked it as possibly extirpated, but I think that ranking is very confusing for the average user. Ring-billed Gull is a common species in Colorado throughout the year, including the breeding season (when younger birds and adults that don't breed often do not migrate north with breeders).

This isn't an isolated case, as these confusing mismatches are numerous with migratory species in winter and migration. I've noticed it for dozens of taxa without doing any sort of comprehensive search. At the very least, it would be beneficial to clean up the language of what iNat displays in the pop-up when you click the conservation status. Right now, there's no mention of 'breeding', which is key to understanding the ranking, in addition to the extinct/extirpated mix-up.

Yeah, I agree with you -- I just think it's disingenuous to "translate" the status of "imperiled" as anything but threatened or endangered.