Initializing Birdbase

[vaneramos]

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.

Comments

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

I totally know what you mean about enjoying the process of re-doing your bird lists in the new software. A year or so ago I transferred mine from paper to MS: Access, and had a great time remembering the various sightings, even though I haven't recorded an interesting sighting in a few years. My total is just a few over 200 (as in not quite 210).

A black-chinned hummingbird as your first record? Wow. Mine was a ... house sparrow, but this was in southeast Detroit.

I'm in awe of your Kirtland's warbler sighting.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I saw and recognized many birds before the black-chinned hummingbird, but that is my earliest specific memory (at the age of 10) to which I could assign a date (because it was exceptional, so Mom wrote a note in the margin of our field guide) when I started keeping a life list a few years later.

By contrast I have a few memories of seeing tufted titmice at our feeder when I was very little. And at Juniper Springs in Florida, where we used to camp every other year, there was one who came to the call of Mrs. Robinson in the concession store, and would eat from her hand. But I have no records of those sightings, tufted titmice have long since vanished from my parents' feeder, and are much more rarely observed in Ontario nowadays. I haven't seen one since I started birding seriously at the age of about 13, so I still don't have the species on my life list.

The Kirtland's warbler was really great. It was a typical exhausted migrant warbler, just arrived from crossing Lake Erie, feeding ravenously, oblivious to the mob of humans standing quietly less than 10 feet away. We watched it for five or ten minutes.

[bixie.livejournal.com]

wow, that's a rigorous lifelist you have going on (with not including the titmice), I'm impressed!

we get them at feeders down here, so if you ever make it to the DC area, you'll be golden. :>

[jwg.livejournal.com]

I think that is really great that you've kept all those detailed records for all these years. Hopefully this software won't go obsolete or there'll be a way to export that data if it does.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

This package has been around for a long time and a lot of serious birders seem to use it, so hopefully it will be kept up to date. The way it's set up now, I will run into a date problem in 2050, but if I'm still birding seriously then, I probably won't mind another opportunity to review my records.

[butterflyminds.livejournal.com]

Will you be sharing this record with outside agencies - bird groups or national registers, that kind of thing? I would think this kind of information ideal in monitoring species, etc.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

No, there are a lot of people who birdwatch much more obsessively than I do, but mostly these records are of little use scientifically because there is no system to the way samples are taken. For example, the fact that a few dozen birders observed a Kirtland's warbler for a few minutes one April morning at Point Pelee National Park tells us far more about human behaviour than it does about the threatened population of said bird species. You just have to visit a place like Point Pelee during bird migration once to see what I mean. Literally tens of thousands of people from all over the world visit to observe the phenomenon of birds migration. So my records are far from unique, and really useless to anyone but me.

However, I do participate as a volunteer in the annual North American Breeding Bird Survey. This involves getting out of bed at 4 a.m. so I can start exactly half an hour before sunrise one morning in late June (when birds are most active), driving a specific 40-kilometre route, making 50 stops at exactly the same locations each year, getting out of the car and recording every bird I see and hear within three minutes. Because the data are collected the same way, in the same place and approximately the same time, by the same person every year, they do provide a useful index of species diversity. I enjoy participating in this scientific study just as much as the random, for-fun birdwatching. In the forest in late June I don't see many birds, but I hear them, and for this purpose I've had to learn to identify the vocalizations of every species I am likely to hear.

[bearfinch.livejournal.com]

I had thought of you yesterday when I saw a flock of Cedar waxwings eating berries.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Aha, I was there in spirit.

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

Just waving hello and sending you hugs.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thanks Pete. Been thinking of you.

[bixie.livejournal.com]

sounds like fun!

I'm trying to create a similar record with my lifelist, and I am a good 100+ birds behind you in the total tally (which means that the memorable v. common sightings are few enough that I've been able to retain their stories mentally over the past few years). I look forward to fleshing that narrative out as I see more and spend more time on it. :>

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

That's a pretty cool web page. I dream of owning a good camera for doing wildlife photography, so maybe someday I'll be able to create something like that with my own images, hehe. I envy your Ireland trip!

[bixie.livejournal.com]

thanks! feel free to use the table design; as you noticed, only the geese are my own photos (I'd be happy to use any of yours with credit in the future :> ).

we kind of lucked into the geese in ireland: the refuge is near the town where my grandmother is from, and we were visiting my great-aunt and cousin there and just decided to go check it out. identifying the shelduck was pretty lucky, too--we'd seen it way out in the field with the godwits, and I'd taken some photos through the scope. when I enlarged them, it was basically just a blob (that photo isn't mine), but there aren't that many large white ducks or geese with those stripes. when you compare the blurry photo I have side by side with the one I found online, it's completely obvious that was what it was, which d. and I thought was really hilarious, since it was way out in a field and the photo was through a scope and we weren't even really trying to record the goose itself. :>