BIRDBASE

RECORDING YOUR SIGHTINGS

A sighting gives the date, location, and circumstances in which a bird was seen.

After recording once the date plus general location and circumstances for all the sightings of a birding trip, each bird seen on the trip is recorded by using a list which shows both the common and the scientific names of every bird species. A bird seen is recorded by scanning the list for it then clicking the mouse, or by using a very fast name-finding feature then clicking the mouse.

• When finding a common name you need to type only a string of consecutive letters which you think is long enough to make it unique to the name. You do not need to capitalize or include the spaces, hyphens, and apostrophes that are so difficult to get right since there is continuing disagreement about how they should be used. (For example, "rsseaea" will find "Steller's Sea-Eagle." If the string typed proves to have several matches, because it was not quite long enough to be unique, you are shown each and can pick the correct one.) In finding a scientific name you type the first three or more letters of the genus, a space, then the first three or more letters of the species. (Allowing these short strings to be matched anywhere in the names would produce many false matches. Furthermore, requiring them to be at the beginnings of the names puts the feature in accord with an abbreviated notation for scientific names frequently used by serious birders. For example, "pha pen" is used as an abbreviation for "Phalacrocorax penicillatus" and in BirdBase the abbreviation will find the name.) These features, present in no other listing software, are very important in making it easy to record the birds seen on a trip. The four-letter "banding code" scheme for finding a common name, used by our principal competitor, is filled with ambiguity when applied to the more than 9900 world species.

A note of up to 5000 words can be recorded with each sighting to describe its specific location and circumstances. There is also a quick-recording mode available if no notes are used. And any errors in sightings can be corrected easily.

When recording birds seen in the program of our principal competitor you can view either all the common names of birds or all their scientific names, but not both at the same time. However, any experienced birder will confirm that it is often necessary to consider both common and scientific names to determine what birds were seen on a foreign birding trip.

• Recording is made even easier by the fact that either the "full list" or a "short list" of bird names can be used. If the full list contains the world birds the short list can be the birds of North America and Hawaii, or of anywhere else. If the full list is the North American and Hawaiian birds the short list can be the birds of any U.S. state or of any Canadian province or territory.
• Special provisions make it very easy for two people who frequently, but not always, do their birding together to record their sightings in the same database.
• A sighting in which the species identification is questionable can be given uncertain status, which prevents the species from being added to any of your built-in life lists and also prevents it from being treated as the species' first sighting. If you later resolve the question it is easy to remove the sighting's uncertain status, either keeping the original species or changing it to a new one. This automatically adds the original or new species to all built-in life lists where it is not already present and also makes the sighting a first sighting if it has the earliest date.
• And sightings with spoken notes can be recorded on a Pocket PC if you have our Pocket PC Add-On.

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DISPLAYING YOUR SIGHTINGS

Nine built-in life lists -- plus thousands of life lists and annual lists that you design just as you like -- are updated automatically when sightings are recorded. The program can display any of these lists, and a hit list of the full list or short list birds you have not seen. Producing from nearly 30000 sightings a complete screen display of more than 3000 species on a world life list (Tom Southerland's list in the Birding software demonstration) is almost instantaneous.

You design a list for the program to display by limiting the sightings on it to none, one, or several of the following:

• any of the eight world faunal zones;
• any ABA reporting region or area;
• any nation; any state, province, county, etc., of every nation;
• any area with boundaries defined by latitude and longitude,
• any particular location;
• any particular trip;
• any subspecies (see below), species, genus, family, or order;
• any range of dates between 1900 and 2100;
• any range of yearless dates (e.g., a particular month in all years);
• the earliest sighting of each species in any range of dates;
• the sightings which are or are not "marked" in any way you wish (e.g., "photographed," "heard but not seen," "seen on nest," "immature," "birder's name," etc.);
• the sightings that do not have uncertain status.

These lists, which are produced in taxonomical and/or chronological sequence, can show only the common and scientific names of their birds. Or they can show full information about every sighting they contain, with each multiline note for a sighting displayed in its proper place along with the sighting's other information. The program of our principal competitor forces the user to read multiline notes from completely separate displays.

All displays can be put on screen, printed on paper, or written to text or data disk files for word processors, spread sheets, etc. The paper and word processor disk file outputs are exact images of the screen displays. And the use of a nonproportional font allows the formatting in the displays to be done entirely with space characters. This absence of special formatting characters makes it very much easier for you to post properly formatted lists of the birds seen on a trip to Internet news groups or mailing lists. And the disk files let you include the information in a document you are writing or use it for technical purposes such as statistical analyses and graphing.

The program always describes on screen every choice currently available to the user. And there is on-screen help which shows an alphabetized list of every possible procedure, with click-by-click instructions for carrying it out. The users manual contains complete click-by-click tutorials that assume very little prior computer experience. And we provide at no charge unlimited help by telephone, e-mail, fax, and post.

What BirdBase does not have is a rudimentary data file backup facility, like the one in the software of our principal competitor. We consider such a facility to be undesirable because it diverts users from making backups with the safety and convenience of backup software produced by professionals specializing in it.

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WHAT ABOUT ALL YOUR WRITTEN RECORDS?

BirdBase provides four different ways to enter the written records you have accumulated before obtaining the program. These range from a very rapid procedure that enters only your life list with one click per species to a procedure that enters all the details of every sighting in your records but takes considerably more time. Such options are not found in other sightings programs.

Furthermore, it is not necessary to put in all the historical data before putting in any contemporary data. That is, you can enter in BirdBase some of your old written records when you have some spare time, then enter the new data from today's birding trip, then enter some more old records when you again have some more spare time, etc.

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UPDATING THE SPECIES LIST

The latest annual update of the sixth edition of The Clements Checklist of Birds of the World is the source of the species list in new copies of the world version of BirdBase. The version selling for a reduced price has a list of the species of North America and Hawaii taken from Clements' world list that is also updated frequently.

The sixth edition of Dr. Clements' book made major changes in the ABA list of world birds, such as moving families to new positions in the taxonomical sequence. We produce each year a new version of a utility that  completely automates putting all the changes of the sixth edition and/or its frequent updates in BirdBase, and largely automates doing this in the sightings previously recorded by the program. But with a little effort BirdBase users can to do it all themselves without the utility by employing the program facilities described below, and many users do so.

Note: If you buy a new copy of BirdBase that we ship after August 1, 2010 you will be able to download from this web site at no charge the next version of the utility described above. It will be available near the end of 2010.

For other sightings programs major taxonomical changes are either impossibly cumbersome to do, or cannot be done at all, with the facilities provided by the programs. As an example, moving a family of one hundred species with a total of two hundred sightings takes about a dozen mouse clicks with BirdBase but many thousands of mouse clicks and key strokes with the program of our principal competitor. Putting major taxonomical changes in this competing program's list of birds is practical only by using a separate utility specially designed for the particular changes -- and the utility still leaves to the user the overwhelming burden of making whatever modifications are needed in each previously recorded sighting that is involved in a change. Yet major taxonomical changes will continue to occur as DNA studies advance.

Before investing many hours over the years recording data in a sightings program be absolutely sure it lets you maintain the integrity of the database yourself instead of making you depend on someone else to continue producing special utilities!

• To let you keep up with the changes so frequently occurring in bird names and taxonomy, such changes are easily incorporated by BirdBase in its bird species list -- no separate utility is required! That is, with BirdBase species, genera, families, and orders can be renamed, added, deleted, moved, combined, or split. In all of these operations (except a split) all bird sightings previously recorded are brought into agreement with the new bird list automatically -- a feature that can save you a tremendous amount of work but is not found in programs that give us significant competition. (After BirdBase has split a species in the bird list it shows the sightings of the split species and, for each, asks to which species produced by the split should the sighting be assigned.) There is absolutely no limitation to the taxonomical changes that can be made by BirdBase, so your database can never become outdated.

BirdBase is uniquely well suited to dealing with subspecies -- which have recently become of great interest to many birders as a result of their inclusion in the fifth and sixth editions of Dr. Clements' book. The program lets you enter subspecies names in a drop-down list which can hold many more names than the total number of avian subspecies. You can build the list a subspecies name at a time, as your need for each name arises, because editing the list is easy and it alphabetizes itself automatically. Or you can use the All Subspecies Add-On. Furthermore, since BirdBase has features that let you immediately find the subspecies of a particular species, and since the list is accessible when you are writing the note to be recorded for an individual sighting, specifying the subspecies sighted becomes a rapid procedure. The program also lets sightings displayed be limited to those for which their notes contain a particular subspecies name and makes the drop-down list available when specifying the limitation. Consequently, you can produce life and annual lists of all sightings of a particular subspecies for the whole world or any part of the world.

The software of our principal competitor does not allow changing a subspecies list. This leaves its users in the precarious position of depending on someone else to keep their birding database valid. The reason is that every split or combination in Dr. Clements' species list causes changes in his subspecies list, but these changes can be put in our competitor's software only by obtaining from them a subspecies list update. There are frequent updates to the BirdBase All Subspecies Add-On. However, our users are not dependent on the updates because with BirdBase it is very easy to make changes in the subspecies list by employing the editing facilities built into BirdBase.

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TRANSLATING THE COMMON NAMES

Because BirdBase supports the full ASCII character set the common names in its species list can be translated into any language that can be written in Roman letters, including letters with diacritical marks such as â, ä, à, á, å, and æ. And since BirdBase makes it very easy to change the names in the species list plus those in any sightings that have been recorded, it would not take much time for you to translate into your language all the common names of the birds of your part of the world. You could later do it for birds you see elsewhere a common name at a time as you see these birds.

If you get BirdArea as well as BirdBase, which most of our customers do, on request we will include in your order a free Translation Utility Program that automatically copies all common name translations from BirdBase to BirdArea. This means that you will only have to do the translating once. Also, the utility stores your work in a file that lets it put the translations in the frequent updates which we make available for the BirdBase species list plus recorded sightings and for the BirdArea species list plus range data. This again means that you will only have to do the translating once. Furthermore, after carrying out the translations you can give a copy of the utility and the translation file it makes to a compatriot who uses BirdBase and BirdArea so that he/she can take advantage of your work.

Due to the fact that the Translation Utility Program changes only the common names in the species list in BirdBase and BirdArea plus those in all sightings that have been recorded, it can be used at any time without disturbing any other data in either program.

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UPDATING THE PROGRAM FEATURES

We frequently update the BirdBase program by adding new features and improving existing features. This is done whenever we think of something that would be an improvement to the program -- or a user suggests such an improvement. When this happens we immediately start shipping the updated program to people purchasing a new copy of BirdBase. And, if the update is not a major rewrite as when the DOS version of BirdBase was converted to the Windows version in 1996 or the Windows version was changed in 2007 to make it completely compatible with Windows Vista (while retaining compatibility with earlier versions of Windows) we also post on this web site a free download of the updated program for people who already have a copy. For more information about the many free downloads we have made available in recent years take this link to the section BirdBase program update.

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ADDING YOUR SIGHTINGS TO EBIRD

There is a downloadable utility that converts BirdBase sightings files into a format that facilitates adding them to the eBird database created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and used by scientists worldwide. For more information click here.

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