BUBO Listing News

19 June 2008

What's the most difficult bird to see on a particular list? We have dramatically improved the performance of the "blockers" facility in BUBO Listing so that is now possible to see, in a matter of seconds, those species that have been seen by the fewest listers.

For example, there are currently five species on British lists that have only been recorded by single observers. Interestingly these are all American vagrants and include such megas as American Kestrel, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker and Magnolia Warbler.

To view blockers for any list, just go to View All Lists as normal but ensure that you check 'Combined List' rather than 'Rankings'. Clicking on a species will show you who has recorded it and where.

25 March 2008

In recent weeks we have been working to make it easier for us to add new location/regions and authorities for you to record your lists against. The main difference that users will notice is the new location selector within "View All Lists" and "Create New List". Instead of a short list of locations, plus a separate drop-down of UK counties, we have now introduced a hierarchical tree linking all potential listing locations to one another. The "location tree" will include anything from the scale of the world, down to the scale of individual sites (coming soon). Locations can be selected either by:

1. Browsing through the tree and clicking the required location, or
2. Typing the name (or part of the name) of the required location into the adjacent box, or
3. Selecting (or typing part of the name of) a location from the 'popular locations' box

We have taken the advantage of the new location tree to introduce a few new listing locations. The "North and Middle America" location takes the American Ornithologists' Union checklist as its authority, whilst the "Continental North America" location, and subdivisions of this (Canada, Continental USA, Lower 48 USA), use the American Birding Association checklist.

We have also taken the opportunity to bring all of the existing authorities up to date, and have introduced new authorities for Ireland and the Channel Islands.

The range of locations currently included is not complete. To save on clutter, we intend to populate the tree gradually, and largely following the requests of BUBO Listers. Only locations that anyone wishes to record a list against will be included. Therefore, if you wish to add a list for a location that is not currently included then please get in touch with us and let us know as much information about the location as possible (e.g. name, where it is, description of boundaries). We'll try to add it as soon as possible. Some of our immediate plans based on listers requests are to add South America, Australia, India, Iceland, Connecticut, etc. When we have completed several of these large regions and countries we will then introduce individual site lists.

We have also decided to make the "View All Lists" functionality available via the home page to anyone, not just to registered users. Given that BUBO Listing is designed to be entirely transparent, we felt that this was in keeping with our ethos and might also attract more users to get involved.

As always, please send us your thoughts and ideas for potential improvements. In particular, as we are making a number of changes to the way BUBO Listing works, please let us know as soon as possible if you find any apparent bugs that might have crept in. Finally, don't forget to let us know if there are any new locations you wish to record lists against.

15 December 2007

At first Britain, then the Western Palearctic, and now the World! At last, BUBO Listing makes it possible for you to record, share and compare your World Lists.

We have decided to follow the Clements checklist as the authority for our launch of BUBO World Listing. The 6th edition of this recognised standard world list was published in 2007 and, following the death of Jim Clements in 2005, is now being maintained by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Cornell are publishing regular updates to the list and BUBO Listing will endeavour to keep up with these updates. In time, we may well introduce world base-lists by other authorities to allow users to record their world lists using different taxonomic treatments.

Recording your World List on BUBO Listing is the same as with any other lists. However, we recognise that for the well-travelled birder, the size of the list could mean that it would be impractical to add the list in one go, but too tedious to add the species one at a time. Therefore, to aid the creation of World Lists, we have now developed a 'Batch Edit' mode. This means that you can enter as much of your list as you like to start with, then come back in later and enter another block.

Of course, a sizeable proportion of your world list may already be contained within another list you have already entered (e.g. a British or Western Palearctic list). If so, it is easy to kick-start your World List by copying the species across from such a previously created list . There will be some species that don't copy across, because of differing taxonomies between (for example) the BOU British List and the Clements World List , but the vast majority of species will copy across easily, saving you a large amount of re-typing.

We hope BUBO Listers find this new facility useful and enjoyable. As always, if you have any comments or find any errors (and with nearly 10,000 species, there must be a few!) then let us know and we'll put them right as soon as possible.

And what next for BUBO Listing? Well, we'll next be looking at supporting lists for more individual countries, followed by listing for other species groups such as buttterflies. Keep listing!

11 December 2007

We always welcome suggestions from BUBO Listers as to how we can enhance BUBO Listing and one frequently mentioned comment has been that, whilst it is relatively quick to create a new list, if you do not add all your sightings at the time of list creation, then it is slower to add species later using the 'Add Species to List' option. Based on this feedback we have now implemented a new batch edit mode for existing lists. This will make it easier and faster to add new species (or make updates, or deletions) to an existing list.

From either menu option of 'View/Edit My Lists' and 'Add Species to List', you will now see an extra button 'Batch Edit'. Select a list and then click this button to see a checklist display of your list, split over multiple pages. You can then add species by ticking the 'Seen?' checkbox and entering additional species details as necessary. Untick the box to remove a species and just edit directly the date, location, comments and sensitive flag if you wish to update an existing record. When you have made the necessary changes on the page just click 'Save Records'. If there are any errors in your entry, e.g. date and location missing for a rarity, you will be prompted to correct these before any changes are saved.

You can navigate between pages of the checklist by simply clicking the required page number or using the other navigation links to go to the next page, jump ten pages, or go to the first or last pages accordingly. Remember to save any changes from the current page before you navigate to a different page though, otherwise your changes will be lost.

Thanks to those who commented on this area and please do keep the comments coming (via the Contact form) so that we can continue to improve on BUBO Listing and make it the number one site for bird listing worldwide.