Life birds and Ticks? (1 Viewer)

Hi all,

For our ongoing research for our new Southern Africa online bird spotting platform, I wonder if you could tell me how 'Ticks' and 'Life' birds work. I need to build this into the birding journal platform to automatically add x birds as ticks and x birds as life birds for the journal summary area.

Many thanks,

Jean

Jean,

A 'tick' refers to a birder adding the first record of a bird on ANY maintained list – it could be a world list, regional list, national list, county list, patch list, site list, garden/yard list, trip list etc; and in each case it could be a life (ie lifetime) list, year list, month list, day list etc.

A 'life bird' generally refers to a birder's first ever encounter with a particular species.

Thanks Richard!

So a life bird will be addition of a new species to a birders overall list that they have not sighted before? Whereas a tick would be a new sighting of a species to a world list, regional list, national list, county list, patch list, site list, garden/yard list, trip list? I noticed Delia has a yearly 'tick' list.

Richard Klim said:

Jean,

A 'tick' refers to a birder adding the first record of a bird on ANY maintained list – it could be a world list, regional list, national list, county list, patch list, site list, garden/yard list, trip list etc; and in each case it could be a life (ie lifetime) list, year list, month list, day list etc.

A 'life bird' generally refers to a birder's first ever encounter with a particular species.

Click to expand...

Most birders are almost obsessive about lists. I keep a garden, patch, county and national list for the UK. I also have lists for the countries I've visited, a 'life' list of all the species I've seen. Then I have lists for year, month and what I've seen that day. I count a "tick" as either a bird new for the year or site and a "lifer" as my very first sighting ever. There is also the 'list that shall not speak it's name' ........ birds I haven't seen yet.

Chris

That is incredible! And a lot of hard work! I will see how I can design and code the journal with tick boxes to add each sighting and add a list of those categories. How exciting!

chris butterworth said:

Most birders are almost obsessive about lists. I keep a garden, patch, county and national list for the UK. I also have lists for the countries I've visited, a 'life' list of all the species I've seen. Then I have lists for year, month and what I've seen that day. I count a "tick" as either a bird new for the year or site and a "lifer" as my very first sighting ever. There is also the 'list that shall not speak it's name' ........ birds I haven't seen yet.

Chris

Click to expand...

And there is the issue of birds heard but not seen........

Ticks and lists go together as it's the ticks that make the list.
Life list.....given that the life list could be county / country / world etc
Year list....birds seen or heard in that year and in the area the list relates to....garden / county / country /local patch etc etc.

all about compulsive / competitive listing and we love it despite it being completely pointless to anybody else but the lister.

Hi,

The nature of ticks is something of a quagmire because everyone has their own createria, for example I have World, Western Palearctic, Country, County, Garden and Walk to Work. Others have their own list and more esoteric examples being such things as Escapes and even Seen on TV. If within your online journal you try and predefine these lists you will fail because everyone has their own specific needs.

The approach I would suggest is to have something configurable. What I mean is that you have a number of fields available to be used as tick boxes and allow the user to choose how they wish to use them by allowing them to add their own field description against each tick box. This would work not only for keeping lists but also any other attributes thay might wish to record, for example, I like to note whether a bird is self found or not.

Incientally I think we have similar jobs. Being a business analyst I constantly have to struggle with requirements gathering, but generally not for such an interesting projects.

David