Initializing Birdbase

I'm seldom fussy about anything anymore, but bird data is one of the few things I still enjoy being anal retentive about. The new BirdBase software arrived in the mail yesterday, so now—what fun!—I get to transcribe all the bird sightings of my life into it.

I could initialize more simply by entering a list of the species I've already seen—my life list—but it's more interesting to maintain details of time, place and conditions.

So I've gone back to the beginning. Some years ago I keyed into Datahawk all the handwritten lists and records I'd kept since my teens. That software served me well for a few years, but wouldn't apply dates in the correct order after Y2K, and simply stopped accepting new data in 2004 (I would enter entire trip reports, only to have them vanish). The older records are still accessible, but can't be exported. I have to enter it all by hand again. You might consider that tedious, but actually it's a chance to revisit some of life's most exhilarating adventures.

My earliest record was something highly improbably, a black-chinned hummingbird, resident of the Southwest, which accidentally visited our garden beside Lake Erie on May 11, 1974. I was 10. I remember watching it with my parents: first feeding at the flowers, then coming to challenge its own reflection in the living room window. It remained there an extended period of time so we could carefully study its features and come to a clear conclusion. That was one of the experiences that aroused my fascination with birds.

From my youth also come records of trips to Florida, and Alberta and British Columbia, recording such exotics as limpkin, yellow-headed blackbird and rufus hummingbird. I still remember the family of northern bobwhites that skittered past our campsite at Juniper Springs in Florida in 1977. Technically I should be able to see these quail in Ontario, too, but never have.

So far I have transferred all the records up to 1984, setting the groundwork for my life list with 88 species. I have a ways to go. Now the total stands somewhere around 240, not a large number, but one that every serious birder strives to enlarge. The mid 1990s will be a challenging time period to work through; when I went on many escursions and recorded dozens of trips each year. But there are memories to look forward to, like the varied thrush, a western bird that wintered at our bird feeder in 1994. A report went on the bird hotlines, and human visitors came from as far as Quebec and Ohio to stand in our driveway and peer at the colourful stranger. And there was the Kirtland's Warbler that posed at Point Pelee for a crowd of onlookers—it's one of the rarest birds, with fewer than 500 individuals remaining.

Another difficult part will be organizing the trail of haphazard records I've kept since Datahawk failed in 2004. I will need to pore through notes scrawled in the margins of field guides, retrieve the annual the Breeding Bird Survey raw data archived at USGS, and reread a few birding expeditions recorded on LiveJournal.

I'm waiting at home for a few minutes for the walk-in clinic to open at 9. I need to look after a splinter that lodged under my left thumbnail on Monday.