BUBO Listing News
116 new species have been added and 16 removed with the update of the Clements World List following Cornell's October 2024 update.
The most significant bonuses are:
- four way split of Herring Gull (into American Herring, European Herring, Mongolian and Vega Gulls)
- seven way split of House Wren (Northern, Southern and five Caribbean island endemics)
- split of Cory's and Scopoli's Shearwaters
- Barn Owl split into Western, Eastern, and American
- Red-rumped Swallow into European, African, and Eastern (with Striated Swallow lumped into the latter)
- Rock Martin into Pale, Red-throated, and Southern Crag-Martins
- Cocos Booby split from Brown Booby
- Common Cicadabird split into 13 species
- Island Thrush split into 17 species
However, most listers will also be losing species following the lumping of the three Redpolls.
As usual we have automatically applied what updates we can, and remaining updates needed will be highlighted for you. See the eBird taxonomy article for help in identifying changes to your lists.
Group lists are ideal for a local group wishing to document the full species list, including historical records, for their recording area, whether this is a formal society or an informal recording group of watchers at a patch. They are also great for a few friends who regularly travel together and wish to keep an overall list from their trips, or even tour companies (like Bubo Birding!)
We introduced group lists before and have now made them even better! There are two options for creating a group list:
- The preferred approach is to use a group account, e.g. Dawlish Warren Recording Group, Swilly Listers. Sign up as usual but select 'Yes' to the 'Group Account?' question. Any lists that a group account creates will automatically be treated as group lists. Note that you will need a different email from the one used for your personal account. You can then share the email and password with other members of the group, so that anyone can edit your group lists.
- Alternatively if you are the only one making changes to a group list, you can create a list under your personal account but mark it as a group list. Create the list as usual but select 'Yes' to 'Make this a group list?'. These lists will be shown with your others under My Lists but indicated as group lists. Only you can edit this so it makes sense to add a comment such as "Group list: send any updates to name/email".
Note that all group lists are excluded from rankings tables by default as the totals are misleading when compared with individual listers. Use the group icon to include and exclude them. They are also shown with the group icon next to their name to make them obvious.
Regardless of group lists, you can always view a combined list based on all the different BUBO listers who have entered that list: view lists as normal but ensure you select 'Combined List' instead of rankings. This also shows you the "blockers", or the rarest species in terms of the number of listers who have recorded them. E.g. the combined Swillington Ings 2024 list has reached 176 species but no individual Swilly lister has seen more than 164, and there are six single observer sightings. Where will they be by the end of the year?
We will be developing group lists further, including the ability to view the top sites for an area. If there are features you'd like to see, do let us know.
Have you got lots of lists? There are several BUBO listers with more than 100, so we have now made it possible to filter your lists based on the location and the period, i.e. life or year. Hence you can easily see just your British year lists for example.
The much-awaited IOC 14.2 update with its 102 new species (and 17 lost) is now live. No more Common or Arctic Redpolls, but a small number of listers will have been well-compensated with Island Thrushes!
As usual we have automatically applied what updates we can, and remaining updates needed will be highlighted for you. Individual country lists will have some incorrect, or missing, species: it's difficult and time-consuming to get all these right, as IOC don't publish individual country lists themselves. Wide-ranging taxa such as Brown and Cocos Boobies, and the Red-rumped Swallows, are especially difficult.
Please add to the forum post if you have any queries.
Any of the country or regional checklists used by BUBO Listing can now easily be downloaded in a CSV format suitable for reading in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets for example. Just use the red download button on the right side (as shown below for the BOU British List).
You can even download just a family and not the entire list, by filtering on that first.
Downloading a taxa group is especially useful for Pan-species Listing lists, where the total PSL checklist is more than 75,000 species! Now it's easy to get a list of just the 8,000 or more Hymenoptera for example!
We've also simplified downloading your own lists, or targets, or indeed any other person's list. Just view the list (or targets, blockers, family list) and use the red (green on panspecieslisting.com) download button.