Bird Listing Software? (1 Viewer)

[Lorne]

Back in the late 90’s myself & my wife spent a couple of winters, recording all our bird sightings on Birding Database with Windows 98. In 2001 I upgraded to the deadly Windows ME, unfortunately this crashed & burn out the Birding Database.
So, 10 years later I thought its time to redo it all again, but I can’t find a decent listing program or software, can anyone tell me what can I use? I assume “not American” as they do not work with UK listing.

 

[delia todd]

Hi Lorne

Have a look at Jeff's and see what you think: http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=75348&highlight=Jeff's

D

 

[dbradnum]

This looks quite interesting, though I've not tried it.

http://www.bluebirdtechnology.com/

 

[Jim M.]

Back in the late 90’s myself & my wife spent a couple of winters, recording all our bird sightings on Birding Database with Windows 98. In 2001 I upgraded to the deadly Windows ME, unfortunately this crashed & burn out the Birding Database.
So, 10 years later I thought its time to redo it all again, but I can’t find a decent listing program or software, can anyone tell me what can I use? I assume “not American” as they do not work with UK listing.

Have you considered just entering your sightings online (in a database such as eBird--see link in my signature). That's primarily what I do now. It has a lot of advantages. You don't have to worry about losing data through computer crashes, and, at least with eBird, your data will be publicly available for use by scientists and other birders.

Best,
Jim

 

[fugl]

So, 10 years later I thought its time to redo it all again, but I can’t find a decent listing program or software, can anyone tell me what can I use? I assume “not American” as they do not work with UK listing.

I’ve used Birder’s Diary--which is very fully featured & versatile--for years & have been very satisfied with it. And though an American product, it has up-to-date world & regional lists, including one for the UK. It's not inexpensive, however. Here’s the URL in case you want to check it out: http://www.birdersdiary.com/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx

 

[Keith Dickinson]

I'll add another vote Jeff's database. You need Access to use it but Jeff has a link on his page for a runtime version that will let you run the listing program.
I've getting on for 28 years worth of records listed via this program and it really does the job. Dead easy to drag info from the list via the custom made reports page.

Hi Lorne

Have a look at Jeff's and see what you think: http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=75348&highlight=Jeff's

D

 

[Captain_of_Crunch]

If your sightings are mainly for Britain and Ireland, I would suggest using BirdTrack. It would also mean that your sightings will contribute to the forthcoming Atlas.

Another free option is Observado, especially if trying to keep track of sightings of birds, mammals, plants, etc.

 

[Geoff Brown]

Lorne. the RSPB and I use mapmate. It costs about £30 for a private user but will record anything you set on it. Very easy to use as well.

 

[Mal92]

Give Bird Journal a try too. Very comprehensive but also very easy to use.

 

[Lorne]

Wow, 8 replies! OK first D, I may now be an “old” man, but I did years of night school doing Micro office, Photoshop, dreamweaver, even wrote the code for my 1st website, but Jeff's birding database, drove me into frustration! He gave me 3 different downloads, I spent hours trying to even start, it would not accept “Dorset” & all I ever got was this;….Birding Database.jpg

David, I downloaded a test for Bird Journal, but the idea of having a British list in alphabetical names?? Headings like Chickadees & Tits, no way that is just crazy! Also so many graphs?? Who wants graphs in their birdlist?

I am not sure about online listing I have checked these 3, birdstack, bubo.org/ and the Nederlands prog. Observado, but I will check them again, & let you know. Meantime I will check those others.

 

[alancairns]

Lorne

(warning - long post. I hope it will be useful to others)

If you are strictly limiting your list to British birds, I understand that there are several British option, of which I have no experience.

If you are interested in International birding, there are several available packages for both Mac and Windows.

For Windows there is Avisys, Birder's Diary, Bird Journal, Wings, and Swift.

For Mac there is Wings and Bird Brain. All of the Windows packages will run well on a Mac using either Bootcamp or Parallels. None of them work with Crossover unfortunately.

Then there are the online listing options, of which I am only familiar with eBird. Recently eBird expanded its scope from the Americas only to World wide. I enter all my sightings on eBird to make them available for ornithological studies, but I don't use it as my primary listing software. It is OK for simple reports, but it doesn't have the options that any of the software packages do. Still, it would be viable if you want simple listing. I would recommend using a local software product and uploading your sightings from it to eBird. All of the packages have a facility to let you do that. eBird uses all American species names.

I was going to do a mini-review of all the packages, but in the interests of keeping this post a tolerable length I have decided to upload that as a pdf attachment.

As for Bird Journal, I think you might look at it again. The programme has a lot more depth than appears at first glance. There are synonym files available on the website for British names. The graphs are useful after you have a decent amount of sightings entered, but they can be ignored if you're not interested. Ordering by taxonomy is almost ready, and will arrive as a point update. I agree that the lack of this facility is the software's weakest point.

I will upload the attachment later today.

Good birding

Alan

 

[Sleeper]

I use Wildlife recorder and to be honest it has as many good points as bad. The advent of me updating the comp to windows 7 made the speech aspect of sightings totally useless.

May I ask if Bird Journal is able to bring up Life lists, regional lists, year lists etc?

 

[thenorthernmonkey]

Definately Birdtrack for me and if set up properly the sightings can be used for the Atlas etc...

 

[davids]

Yes bird journal will produce a wide range of lists according to a parameters which you can select.

It will also import from Wildlife recorder but the process isn't perfect. It recognises species OK but not location names.

David

 

[alancairns]

I have uploaded and attached my "mini review" of software packages.

Alan

 

[njlarsen]

Birdbase has not been mentioned. It is somewhat old-fashioned in its setup but it works well for my roughly 17000 observations. I can get a country or state list showing the total list of species with annotation of the endemic ones and of the ones I have seen inside or outside the area of interest. There is also a translation utility that allows me to export observations into Ebird format.

As I have not looked at the alternatives in any detail, I dont know if I would choose to go this way again, but switching after having entered the data would be a pain. It is therefore important to get one that can grow with your needs.

Niels

 

[steveMc]

Hello Lorne,

I am the owner of the company who developed SWIFT (one of the products listed in Alan Cairns' reviews). First off I would like to thank Alan for including our product (and link) in his post and in the review. We are also looking forward to Alan retrying the demo of SWIFT and giving his feedback here.

I just wanted to clear up a couple of points mentioned about SWIFT. First, about it being solely trip-based. In SWIFT you can choose to have your sightings simply recorded against any of your lists with no dates involved, or you can specify the date and also the time of the sighting (if wanted). This can be set while entering each sighting or as an overall preference for all sighting entries. Of course no matter your preference setting, you can quickly override it at the time of entering a sighting.

Second point about data entry; we strived to make SWIFT as simple for entering your sightings as possible. To that end, once you have setup a list and have a few sightings recorded on it, SWIFT 'learns' about your regularly sighted species and can add some or all of them to a sighting at the click of a button. As an example, you could create a sighting with 100+ species in it in a matter of 4-5 clicks of the mouse. This is one of the favourite features of our software according to feedback from our users and greatly speeds up data entry.

I wanted to clear these up, as these two are among the most important features of our software. Speed of sighting entry and giving birder's the ability to date their sightings or simply record them against a single list.

I hope my posting here is not against the rules, and if so hopefully the moderators will let me know. Just thought this information might be useful to you or anyone else reading here.

Thanks and good birding!

 

[Lorne]

Hi there & thanks for so many suggestions, I have been working my way thru most of the recommendations. My first problem with the on-line progs is the amount of listing I would send in. For example this is my current year list;
BIRDING LISTS for 2010
Nov-10

Garden List.
Jan. 2 Blackredstart stayed for 2 weeks.
April 12 Red Kite flew over.
Oct. 22 Red Kite flew over.

Dorset List.
Jan. 24 I found a Yellow-browed W. at Radipole.
March.7 Bufflehead.on the Fleet.
March 28 Alpine Swift Radipole,
June 30 Gull-billed Tern. Abbotsbury
Sept. 9 Pectoral Sandpiper. Portland


UK Year List.
March 14 Wood Duck???? New Forest.
March 28 Alpine Swift Radipole, Dorset
June 10 Marmora’s Warbler, Wales.
July 6 House Finch Devon.
July 21 White-tailed Plover Kent.
Nov. 4 American Bittern Cornwall.

So possibly not a lot for eBird. In 2009 we did a drive around the Northern part of South Africa & say 343 species, so this would probably only go into their worldlist?
I have to thank Alan for your reviews, & I am looking at Wings5 as a possibility, I have downloaded the prog, & will be trying it out this afternoon.
Then the message from steveMc for Swift is also maybe something to try.
Going back to the crashed Birding Database, 10 years ago I did find that I once was able to access some of the info with a trial of Filemaker pro, but not sure of its code, and far to expensive to buy just to check if it can work, Fugl has recommended Birder’s Diary, but it seems the various parts are complicated & costly, but it does say it can use this; The CSV File Format; “Comma Separated Value" which can access some different files?
Regards

 

[hjvandijk]

Check obseravado.org wich covers all species groups

 

[njlarsen]

Lorne, if the old file is comma delimited, try opening it in Excel or similar spreadsheet: importantly, open the program first and then try opening the file from within the program. That way, an import program might help.

Regarding Ebird, you probably have seen a lot more birds than that list states; it is a question of getting into habit of writing down also the common ones while you are out there.

Also regarding Ebird, they now have a country list of each country of the world, so they would be interested also in your South African observations, but they want you to enter sightings with locations, not just country wide ("I saw an osprey in the UK, but I don't want to tell where" is not really their way of doing things).

Cheers
Niels