How to create a birding lifelist

[michael-ibk]

A question for all the experienced birders among us: I am toying with the idea of creating a birding lifelist in the winter months. Apart from the Big Year and my local sightings (where I use ornitho.at) I haven´t done any database-stuff with my birding trips, and really would like to. Actually I don´t even have any idea how many birds I have seen (or photographed) worldwide.

 

I am unsure how to approach this project, typing all the data myself seems very cumbersome, and I really hope there must be some options online. A quick Google search didn´t really produce a quick solution for me.

 

So I was wondering, how are you all doing this, and what method would you recommend?

 

Thanks in advance!

[pedro maia]

Do you know this website, Michael?

 

https://bubo.org/

[michael-ibk]

It's one of the sites I stumbled upon Pedro (Scythebill is another one), but I have no experience with it. Do you use it? My main issue is I'd have to enter years of sightings from a lot of different places so I'm looking for the most user-friendly way to accomplish that,

[pedro maia]

I started to use it maybe one month ago, somebody from the Portuguese forum told me about it as I was asking for some advices and one of the tools it has are the target lists, which help to plan where to go and look for the species you miss.

 

Anyway, for me it’s much easier than for you although I’m also checking pictures from previous trips to build a life list from South Africa and I’ll probably build one from Brazil, but I don’t know if it’ possible to export those country lists to a world list.

[Treepol]

@michael-ibk I purchased a subscription to Wildlife Recorder and populated it from past notes, TRs and photos.

 

Its probably more than I need, but it does the job and has a number of handy reporting functions. Of course, you could just start an Excel spreadsheet...

[janzin]

I'm using Birder's Diary http://birdersdiary.com/

 

Its quite easy to use--once you get the hang of it-- and you can generate all sorts of reports fairly easily. You can also choose which taxonomy you want to use (most Americans use Clements, but most Europeans I think use IOC.)  I like it because its very quick to enter birds, you can use a checklist or even enter then one by one but its very quick, as it has a smart completion feature (for instance just start typing the name and before you even get three letters it usually picks the right one.)

 

Another nice thing (although I don't take advantage of it) is that they also have checklists for mammals, reptiles, butterflies, etc. although some of these are country specific. But I'm tempted to buy the Mammals of the world one.

 

But there is quite a learning curve initially, and it may be overkill for what you want. It also gets expensive to keep updating it with the newest taxonomies; I only update it every two or three years.

 

Other options are eBird, of course, and its free, but I don't think that's used much in Europe either. There are a lot of downsides to eBird, IMHO, one being that its online only.  https://ebird.org/home 

 

Alot of folks use iGoTerra.  but I don't know too much about it. I know some birding companies that use it to generate their checklists.  https://www.igoterra.com/landing.asp 

 

There's a good, if a bit old, comparison chart here: http://www.surfbirds.com/Features/birding-software-review-0316.html

 

No matter what you use, the initial set-up of entering past bird lists is always painful!

Edited September 7, 2019 by janzin

[michael-ibk]

Many thanks everybody, I will have a look at the suggestions and see what works for me. You´re right @janzin, ebird is not really used that much at least in my part of Europe, we do www.ornitho.at. (Which also has sites in Germany, Italy, Catalonia and a few others).