Trip Reports help

Cover Photo: Snowcap, Costa Rica from the Surfbirds galleries © Alan Lewis

Welcome to Surfbirds Trip Reports and Sightings Help

* Features
* How To Submit Trip Reports
* Deleting Photos, Editing Reports and Updating Your Profile


We are always here to lend support, just email us at surfbirds AT surfbirds.com if you have a question or suggestion for improvement. Please put "Trip Reports" in the subject line of the email. Many thanks!

FEATURES

The Surfbirds Where to Go Birding/Trip Reports database is designed to help you find the information you need quickly and also to enable you to publish your reports instantly. You have complete control as to when you publish your reports and how and when you wish to re-edit them.

Search - Use the powerful search box on all the main Trip Report pages to search for a specific species (English or Latin) or search for a specific location. The more keywords you use, the better your search will be. For example typing in "Firefinch" will give you dozens of reports but "Mali Firefinch" will give you fewer reports. Also, a search for "Los Angeles" will give you all reports and sightings mentioning this city or "California Gnatcatcher Los Angeles" will give you all reports of this species that mention LA.

Under each region, there is also a link to see photos and find birders from that region.

View by Author or Location - click on an author's name to see all reports and sightings by that author. Also, in Recent Sightings, click on any location name to see all sightings from that location. A camera icon next to a report means that there are photos with that report.

Trip Reports or Recent Sightings - Submitting Recent Sightings are useful if you wish to submit some interesting observations without having to write a more detailed trip report. If you have a local patch that you watch regularly and want to keep an online log of your observations, you can enter your sightings and every time you log in, you can click on "View/Edit Your Recent Sightings" to see a full list of your sightings. By clicking on the location name, sightings can be sorted by location. Sightings can also be useful to others who are looking for a quick overview of birds in a particular location without having to trawl through lots of text in a trip report.

Photos - add up to 6 photos per report. Photos appear as thumbnails at the top of each report that can be clicked on to see the full size image. Each photo is also posted to one of the popular Surfbirds photo galleries.

Feedback - found a report useful or perhaps some of the information was out of date? Please help others by leaving a helpful comment on that report.


HOW TO SUBMIT TRIP REPORTS

Register yourself with a valid email address as you will need to confirm your registration with an email we will send you. You must register even if you already have a Surfbirds account to submit photos.

Login and either add a "Trip Report" or quickly add "Recent Sightings"

To Add a Trip Report, click on "Submit a Trip Report" and then select a region.

We recommend that you have your own copy on your personal computer or disc as a back-up in case there is any sort of a problem when you submit it to Surfbirds.

Typing Your Report Directly into Surfbirds
There are buttons for Bold, Italic and Underline etc to help you with any formatting you may need. You will see when you use these buttons that all bold words have <b> </b> either side of them or <i> </i> for italics. We recommend that you experiment by typing the first 2 paragraphs of your report and then click "Upload" and "Return to the Main Menu" and click on "View/Edit your Reports" to "View" your report to check that the formatting is working OK for you. Then click on "Edit" to carry writing your report from where you left off.

Adding Photographs
If you have any photographs that you would like to submit with your report (max of 6 per report), they will appear as thumbnails at the top of your report and will also appear in one of the Surfbirds Photo Galleries.

Select the gallery that they should be in (eg World Birding). If your photos don't belong in just one gallery (eg you have some animal photos that should also go in the "Mammals Gallery" and bird photos that should be in the "World Birding Gallery") then upload the bird photos to the appropriate bird gallery and then come back to "Edit your Report" and upload your mammal photos to the mammal gallery.

Make sure your photos are less than 50kb in size and that they have simple names such as surfbirds1.jpg and surfbirds2.jpg. Never have more than one decimal point (.) and avoid spaces and slashes (/) in the filename.

Click on "Upload" This may take some time if it is a large report with photos. Please be patient.

Return to Main Menu and click on "View/Edit your Trip Reports". By clicking on "View" you can see how your trip report will look to other readers. If there is anything you wish to change, click on "Edit" In Edit mode, you can also add another photo and select a gallery it will appear in.


Deleting Photos, Editing Reports and Updating Your Profile

Deleting Photographs
You can delete photographs you have already submitted by clicking on "Delete Photographs" in the Main Menu. The photos will also be deleted from the gallery that they were in too.

Update Your Profile - You can update your email address and change your password in the Main Menu.

Edit Your Reports by clicking on "View/Edit your Trip Reports"