Excel checklist of the Birds of the African continent (2 Viewers)

[cbutler]

I have looked online for an excel checklist of the Birds of the African continent without any success.
I can find a PDF checklist but I want an excel to keep a tally of the birds that I have seen.
I seem to recall that the Canary Islands was considered to be included in this list by some.
Any info greatly appreciated

 

[THE_FERN]

I have looked online for an excel checklist of the Birds of the African continent without any success.
I can find a PDF checklist but I want an excel to keep a tally of the birds that I have seen.
I seem to recall that the Canary Islands was considered to be included in this list by some.
Any info greatly appreciated

You can create this in several different ways. One is to query avibase. Another is to take (any of) the main lists like Clements, ioc, hbw in spreadsheet form and simply filter for the countries/areas you want. Probably ebird (Clements) has a list for "Africa" which you can download from the website (go to hotspot region navigation and find "printable list").

Note that even if the lists you find are in pdf form there are ways to extract any text they contain. An easy one is to open in ms word: chrome etc might allow you print/save a pdf as text (not tried)

 

[Jeff Hopkins]

Avibase has set up a website: Bird Links to the World. You can use that to find a checklist for Africa in whichever taxonomy you like. You can then copy and paste that into a spreadsheet. That's how I do it for any country I visit.

 

[THE_FERN]

Avibase has set up a website: Bird Links to the World. You can use that to find a checklist for Africa in whichever taxonomy you like. You can then copy and paste that into a spreadsheet. That's how I do it for any country I visit.

(Note that avibase lists can be quite inaccurate for some parts of the world. I can't say what the African one is like. Many of the links in the lists above seem dead (Geocities anyone?) )

 

[Mono]

I have tried a couple of ways to parse the Avibase generated pdf into Excel but with no success. The African Bird Club lists can only be generated on a per country basis not a whole Africa list.

 

[njlarsen]

I have looked online for an excel checklist of the Birds of the African continent without any success.
I can find a PDF checklist but I want an excel to keep a tally of the birds that I have seen.
I seem to recall that the Canary Islands was considered to be included in this list by some.
Any info greatly appreciated

A question is if this is the best way to do what you want. Look at the free download of Scythebill where the country lists are generated for you and you only need to input the species seen. This app can do so much more if you later decide you want more out of your observations.
Niels

 

[Mysticete]

If I was going to do this in a quick and easy manner (and assuming you don't want subspecies), I would do the following:

1. Download the excel spreadsheet list for the most recent IOC list
2. Use the sort function on the breeding range column
3. Delete all the taxa that don't start with AF, the code for Africa at the beginning of the breeding range info.
4. Use the Sort command again, this time on the first column, which actually has a numerical listing of where the birds go in the taxonomic sequence. This will put things "back" the way they should, including grouping everything with the proper family, genus, and so forth

Downside is again I think the subspecies information would be hard to keep track of, so if you need this it's going to cause a problem. Also this list presumably wouldn't capture vagrants or species that have a presence but miniscule one in Africa. That might not be all that important for you, I don't know. Pelagic species relevant to Africa would begin with AO, IO, or SO, so you would need to either preserve them and edit out the non African species, or cut all of them and then add the relevant species back in.

 

[kweetal]

Delete all the taxa that don't start with AF

That won't be correct because of values like 'NA, MA, SA, AF, OR' (for instance, in Dendrocygna bicolor; and that's just the 4th record that contains 'AF', so I reckon there must be many more that will erroneously get skipped)

It can be done of course, but it'll need a bit more care.

 

[Mysticete]

In my superficial scan, I didn't see any that didn't start with AF, but if that is the case...."shrugs"

I'm not really sure then if what the person wants exists without basically creating the list by hand, which uh...will take a chunk of time. It shouldn't be this difficult though...I am surprised there are not more effective ways to quickly generate such a list.

 

[njlarsen]

It could probably be generated from Scythebill pretty easily, and as said, scythebill is a free download.
Niels

 

[Andy Adcock]

It could probably be generated from Scythebill pretty easily, and as said, scythebill is a free download.
Niels

Exactly so, I just did a quick one for Ghana to check something, I'm sure you could generate one for the continent just as easily.

 

[l_raty]

I have tried a couple of ways to parse the Avibase generated pdf into Excel but with no success.

Not sure why you'd want to do this from the generated .pdf ?
If you start from the online list, e.g. :

Africa bird checklist - Avibase - Bird Checklists of the World

avibase.bsc-eoc.org

...you can simply copy this list, and paste it in a spreadsheet.

 

[Brad Hacker]

https://ebird.org/printableList?regionCode=af

Copy by selecting list with cursor from top to bottom
Open Excel
Paste

 

[SteveClark]

Get Scythebill for this and many other reasons.

 

[Jeff Hopkins]

(Note that avibase lists can be quite inaccurate for some parts of the world. I can't say what the African one is like. Many of the links in the lists above seem dead (Geocities anyone?) )

I agree. The links are usually dead. But I don't use the links. I only use this for checklists.

I click on a continent. You're then given a map and a choice of "Links", "Birding Sites", "Trip Reports" or "Checklists". Click on Checklists and you're good to go. Copy and paste. Or pick a country from the map, then pick checklists.

 

[cbutler]

Thanks for all of the reply's.
I finally cracked it, firstly I Googled "checklist of the birds of Africa" which directed me to Avibase's checklist of the birds of Africa.
From there I selected the taxonomy which was Clements's 2023.
From there I selected "text only"
I then copied and pasted that text into an Excel spreadsheet and formatted the height and width.
It did not seem to have any birds North of the Sahara so I have had to manually add my records for Morocco and Egypt and all seems to have gone well.
Incidentally no one has answered my question is the birds of the Canary Islands included in the Birds of Africa.
The African Bird Club seem to include them.

Come on England

 

[Andy Adcock]

Thanks for all of the reply's.
I finally cracked it, firstly I Googled "checklist of the birds of Africa" which directed me to Avibase's checklist of the birds of Africa.
From there I selected the taxonomy which was Clements's 2023.
From there I selected "text only"
I then copied and pasted that text into an Excel spreadsheet and formatted the height and width.
It did not seem to have any birds North of the Sahara so I have had to manually add my records for Morocco and Egypt and all seems to have gone well.
Incidentally no one has answered my question is the birds of the Canary Islands included in the Birds of Africa.
The African Bird Club seem to include them.

Come on England

None of this would have been necessary had you used Scythebill.

 

[Paul Clapham]

Incidentally no one has answered my question is the birds of the Canary Islands included in the Birds of Africa.
The African Bird Club seem to include them.

Both IOC and eBird consider that they are. And why wouldn't you? Offshore islands should be included.

 

[Steve Lister]

Incidentally no one has answered my question is the birds of the Canary Islands included in the Birds of Africa.
The African Bird Club seem to include them.

Yes.

 

[cbutler]

None of this would have been necessary had you used Scythebill.

Unfortunately i had not been aware of this previously.
Thanks for the info.
Have looked at it and will download it