Computerising your bird records

Computerising your records is relatively easy to do and you do not need any computer programming experience. There are several "off the shelf" programs that you can buy ranging in price from £10 to £120 and all will do the job, although the cheaper ones are a bit basic.

Planning

Think about what you want out of the database of records rather than what you will put in.

- Do you world trip reports or just your garden bird sightings?
- Do you want comprehensive species mapping facilites?
- Do you want to cover other things as well as birds?
- Do you want to use a hand-held device (Palm Pilot or PocketPC) to gather data in the field and then upload it?
- Do you want comprehensive reports (trip lists, species seen lists, records by site, etc.)?
- Do you want to output the data in electronic form to other people (especially to the DOS database!)?

Spend a bit of time thinking about these things, even try mocking up some reports to see what you will require.

What do you need?

Any modern Windows equiped PC is capable of running all the available packages. Apart from the PC and the program, all you need is a bit of foresight and planning and you are up and running.

What is a record?

At the very least, in order to be a valid record you will need to record the date, location, species and observer (ie. you!). Additional information is also desirable such as map reference, numbers, sex, breeding behaviour and interesting comments.

What package is best for me?

At the simplest level of recording, a spreadsheet will do. Each column is a data field and each row a record. Programs such as Excel provide tools for manipulating the data such as the Pivot Table function. However, you will soon come up against some limitations that will set you thinking about a dedicated database program, for example reporting is poor with spreadsheets.

If you are lucky enough to have a database program such as Microsoft Access, you could write your own system. However, this requires a considerable amount of database programming knowledge and experience and is not for the faint hearted. It is great fun and will certainly improve your computing skills and provide you with a system that meets your exact requirements but you will need information not readily available in electronic form such as a species table.

Paul Bingham, one of the DOS Databse inputters uses the Birding Database which fits his requirements well and costs around £30.

One of the simpler programs available is Mapmate (see link on the left). This is used by the Ogston Bird Club and is quick and simple to use, if a little basic. Cost is around £30

At the more sophisticated end of the market is Bird Recorder (Notts Birders use the club equivalent Club Recorder). This provides several levels of sophistication and at the top end includes species mapping, butterfly and other databases as well as a world species checklist. This is a sophisticated piece of kit and has initially a steep learning curve. Many swear by this program, others find it too prescriptive and a bit fiddly. However, it has sold in bucket loads and is certainly the top program in the field in our opinion. Cost is up to around £100.

For hand held devices, there is a version of Bird Recorder which obviously intergrates with the PC version at around £30 or you could consider List Pro which I use on my HP Jornada 568 at a cost of around £17 and which is downloadable from the Ilium site. Incidentally, their site also has lists already set up by others including European and American birds. Or you could download the list of all executions in the USA since 1775 if you want!

Species mapping is very enjoyable and involves plotting your records on a map. This map could be Derbyshire, your village or even your garden. By far the best program is DMap produced by Dr Alan Morton, cost around £70 (included with Bird Recorder Professional) and there is a companion program that allows you to digitise your own maps if you have a scanner.

This program is used by all the major bodies and maps can be found in books and magazine artices, for example British Birds, British Wildlife and BTO publications. It is another program with a steep learning curve, I had to read the instructions before successfully using the program, but the time is not wasted. The DOS use the program extensively and you can see some expamples inthe Derbyshire Bird Report.

Electronic exchange of data

Having gone to the trouble of computerising your data, one of the things you can do with it is to send it to others easily in an electronic format. You could, for example, create a report that looks like the DOS Record Slip and take the drudgery out of slip writing!

Taking this one step further, you could electronically submit your records to the DOS each month or at the end of the year with a few mouse clicks (if you want your records to appear in the Bulletin, you will need to submit record slips in the usual way). The DOS database was custom writen in Access97 to get exactly the system we wanted and for other technical reasons such as the need to keep very large datasets as efficiently as possible. The best format for transmission of data to me via e-mail (DaveRdsn@aol.com) is as a text, ASCII or spreadsheet file attachment to your e-mail with following layout:

Observation date
EURING number (preferable to species name)
Location
Map Reference (either 1km or full - helps discriminate between sites with the same name, eg there are at least 9 Bole Hills and one Bolehill in Derbyshire)
Number seen
Sex
Comments

Note the use of EURING number, species name is useful to have as well.

The links on the left will take you to the websites for the packages listed.

Happy recording, for further advice you can e-mail me atDaveRdsn@aol.com.

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