BUBO Listing News
You can now keep your garden or yard list on BUBO Listing. When you create a garden list, just select a list type of 'Garden'. We recommend doing this at the level of village or town because this helps comparison with other nearby gardens, but you can just create it for the appropriate county or even country.
Optionally, you can create a specific site for your garden using the Add Site facility, and then create the 'Garden' list. If you do create a site for your garden then please set the location type to 'Garden/Yard' as shown in the example below. We recommend you add your garden to the appropriate county in the location tree, but if you wish you could first add the town/city as a location if it is not there already, and add your garden to that. In the example shown below the garden is being added to the already existing location Worthing, but it could have just been added to the county West Sussex. Please use an appropriate geographical name for your garden - you don't have to include the street name as in the example if you think this is better kept private, but it does help in cases where you wish to keep different garden lists within the same area, e.g. if you have moved a short distance.
We recommend you use the list comments feature to indicate any particular rules you use for counting garden/yard birds, e.g. whether birds have to be actually in the garden, or whether you count anything seen from the garden.
It's easy to compare all garden lists within a certain county or state, or even country. For example, see all Yorkshire garden lists. If you have any suggestions about garden listing then please let us know in the BUBO Forums.
You can add your own favourite birding sites to BUBO Listing. Hence if you want to start a list for a particular site or local patch that we do not currently have, just add it yourself!
From View All Lists or Create New List (when logged in), navigate to the place in the world location tree where you wish to add the new site and right-click to bring up a menu of options. Select 'Add new site here' and you will then be able to enter the site details.
Any site you add will be available immediately. From time to time we will review new sites and may move them if we consider there to be a more appropriate place in the location tree for them. You cannot add new countries as they require a corresponding checklist, so contact us for any new countries.
The number in parentheses after the site name is the total number of lists currently available for that location, i.e. the total of life, year, self-found etc.
You can now add overall comments to any list. These comments can be used in many different ways, some examples being:
- highlight the best records, or your favourites
- mention your last tick or ticks
- mention any major dips!
- explain any rules that you use for this list, e.g. not counting heard only species
- include the date you started the list
You can enter comments for a list when you first create it, via Create New List. Alternatively you can add comments to an existing list, or edit them, via My Lists. When you have selected the list and clicked View/Edit List you will see a comments box on the right hand side. Enter your comments here and click Update Comments. The comments will be saved and the page reloaded.
Comments are displayed when you view list rankings for any list. Because the comments can be quite long they may be truncated for display purposes. However, hovering over the truncated comment with the mouse will cause it to be displayed in full. Comments can also be seen for lists that are displayed on the BUBO Listing homepage: here an underlined total means that a comment has been entered for the particular list, and you can view it by hovering over the list total.
As always, if you have any thoughts about this facility, or anything else to do with BUBO Listing, let us know via the BUBO Forums.
The most requested change to BUBO Listing has been for the ability to add a species to more than one list simultaneously, e.g. whilst adding a record to your Britain life list you could also add it to your year list. We're pleased to announce that this facility is now available.
Now when you add a species record to a list, via the My Lists menu option and the Add Species button, you will see a checkbox for 'Add to multiple lists?'. Checking this will show a table of all your lists. (Use the page navigation links if not all your lists are visible.) To select a list use Ctrl-click (Cmd-click on a Mac) - you may select as many as you like this way. When you then click the Add Species button, BUBO Listing will attempt to add the species first to the main list and then to all of the additionally selected lists.
Since the selected lists may be for different authorities and/or different locations, the validation performed is quite complex; the species may already be on one of the selected lists, it may not be available according to the taxonomy used, it may be considered rare or it may not be present for the location. BUBO Listing will show you a list of any errors it encountered so that you know which lists to retry.
If you have any comments on this, or other aspects of BUBO Listing, please let us know in the forums.
We are pleased to announce that we have just launched local patch lists, or site lists. This means you can now create lists for any birding site and compare these with other listers. Currently we have added most key birding sites in England, and will be adding sites for the rest of Britain and Ireland very soon. Other countries will be covered as and when they are requested. If you have a particular local patch that is not included then let us know by email or in the BUBO Forums. Similarly if you can provide a suitable list of sites for countries not currently covered then it will save us a lot of work!
Creating a list for a local patch is the same as for any other location, i.e. either enter part of the site name in the 'location name' box, or browse the 'location tree' to find the required site. Sites that straddle county boundaries are included under both 'parent' counties so they should be easy to find. If you notice any errors or have any requests regarding the site set-up then let us know.
We will be developing this area further over the next few months and would welcome any suggestions.
Obviously the more lists entered for a site the more interesting BUBO Listing becomes, so please encourage your birding friends to join up.