Wildlife Recorder no longer being supported: consider moving to iGoTerra (3 Viewers)

[awiner]

Another question for any Wildlife Recorder users out there...

I've found that it's not that hard to read .mdb files directly, and that Wildlife Recorder backups contain such .mdb files ("So-and-so Birding Records.mdb"). If I use that code, Scythebill can import all the Wildlife Recorder data in one shot (at least, one per taxonomy), without any need to perform per-country exports and separate location exports. I think this will be a dramatically better experience. (And if people take advantage of Scythebill just to move Wildlife Recorder into eBird or make it easier to get it into iGoTerra, I'm still happy!)

The question: are .mdb files available without doing a Wildlife Recorder backup?

 

[awiner]

A quick follow-up: as of Scythebill 18.0.0 (just released), you can now import directly from an .mdb file. This means no need to export at all from Wildlife Recorder, much less any per-country exports. You don't even need to have access to Wildlife Recorder itself - if you've got a backup, you can get the .mdb files from there. Scythebill also now preserves all of the trip data (especially trip notes).

If people just use Scythebill once to get their data out of Wildlife Recorder, then export and use iGoTerra or eBird etc., and never touch Scythebill again, that's fine! (And if iGoTerra would like to use my code to simplify their imports, that's also fine! It's open-source, go for it.)

 

[Steve Gantlett]

That's great. I might want or need to do that. My bird taxonomy and English names in Wildlife Recorder is not standard, but well fiddled with. Will it still work and maintain those?

 

[awiner]

That's great. I might want or need to do that. My bird taxonomy and English names in Wildlife Recorder is not standard, but well fiddled with. Will it still work and maintain those?

Yep, though you might need to do a bit more resolution on the way in, and the risk of some incorrect mappings is higher. But it'll still absolutely work.

That is, Scythebill will just show you screens asking you to figure out what species "My Super-Secret Split Warbler" is. But if you did something less off-the-cuff, like using BOU names instead of "standard" IOC names, it should just work.

 

[bittern]

I have also been using Wildlife Recorder since the very beginning with the initial version in about 1990 or thereabouts, I was also very satisfied by the app and the support that it received. I had planned to continue using it but in the last few days it died and cannot access the data. I think that the problem is Windows 11 24H2 related or OneDrive security issues. I get a message that the file will not open and that it is already opened by another user and you need permission to view its contents. I checked the properties of the file and it says it allows access. Oddly enough I can still read the individual country lists but I cannot add new sightings. If anyone has any ideas I would be delighted to hear from them.

I didn't want to go through the performance of moving to a new app such as Scythebill at my age (80+)

Mike

 

[bittern]

I just converted from Wildlife Recorder to Scythebill yesterday and I was astonished how easy it was. I'm not so keen on adding new sightings but it works and I will get used to it... I have a lot of records from about 1990 and it just worked.

Mike (in Geneva)