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.

Banded Barbet (Lybius undatus)

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!