When it comes to keeping my personal bird records I have never quite entered the modern world, only going as far as keeping my overall lists on a couple of spreadsheets. I have boxes of field notebooks gathering dust in a cupboard somewhere, a nice neat line of page-a-day diaries going back to 1975, and various cardboard folders of holiday checklists and tour reports. And when I need to look anything up it can take hours.
All that should change now. A few months ago someone suggested I should look at Bird Journal, a relative newcomer to the field of bird recording software. A quick check of the trial version available on the Bluebird Technology website (bluebirdtechnology.com) raised my interest. I soon realised that much of what is in my many notebooks and diaries would be far better organised and easier to access if it was in Bird Journal: I just wish I had it (and a computer of course) in 1975.
Bird Journal is available in three versions, local (£35), continent (£49) and complete (£69). I am using the complete one which as well as covering the whole world includes additional features not available in the two smaller versions such as creating your own checklists for birds and other wildlife. The local version is based upon a single country.
Online purchase and installation are both very straightforward, and once installed everything is easy to understand and use. There is a users’ manual included if you ever need to consult it. Essentially you enter details of a site that you go birding at and then you enter details of the birds you see each visit. You can choose to include numbers and comments. Not everyone will want to use all of the features that are available and so it is possible to customise the entry displays somewhat. I have hidden the 'good view' button but kept 'heard only' and 'important sighting' for example. The software quickly recognises a species name as you enter it and is refreshingly unfussy about hyphenated names and so on.
The world version includes checklists for every country. The main taxonomic reference is Clements but where individual countries differ from Clements it is easy to switch from one to the other to cover all the species you need. The checklists are not perfect: I found that the India national list excludes the Andaman and Nicobar islands for example, and a few species I saw in Turkey last year were inexplicably missing. These errors are in the sources used, and as such are not directly attributable to the production team who seem keen to learn of any similar anomalies and can update checklists yearly with each major version release: in the meantime it is possible to amend lists yourself using the 'Edit Checklist' facility. I would like to have seen the IOC taxonomy available as well as Clements: this may be included in a future release.
The whole system is set up on a hierarchical system so that if I entered a set of records for say Swithland Reservoir then it would automatically update my entries for Leicestershire, British, European and World entries for that day, week, year and lifetime lists. Very impressive on the whole, but again I have an odd minor niggle such as Turkey being classed as Europe. The site-hierarchy leads up to continents and there is currently no facility for biogeographical regions that cross continental boundaries such as the Palearctic: this may be addressed in a future release.
Bird Journal is clearly designed to be used after each day's birding and performs admirably if that is what you do. I tend to enter a lot of my records as lists for trips and sites rather than for days, and there is then a problem in that the date displayed is irrelevant. I have not found a way round this but the production team have noted it as a 'feature request', and I just ignore the displays telling me that I saw 210 species on one day in Turkey when in fact it was a two week trip.
There is much more to Bird Journal than I have as yet used. Stored data can be displayed in graphs that will become more meaningful as more records are entered over time. Photographers (of which I am not one) have the facility to store unlimited images in the system's gallery.
In general I find this an excellent and very useful product from a company that are keen to listen to comments and develop their service accordingly. I know two local birders who have been using Bird Journal much longer than I have and they are both very pleased with what it does.
