Here’s a detailed rundown of bug fixes and the new features in this release of Birdathon:
New date range picker in the summary view. You can pick any two dates (and times) and see which birds you saw in that timeframe
Updated to the latest AOS (61st supplement, 2020) and ABA (v8.0.7, July 2020) checklist. Note that Clements is not being updated for 2020, so the taxonomic order for checklists hasn’t changed. Clements is planned to be updated in early 2021, but they haven’t given an exact date yet
McCown's Longspur is now Thick-billed Longspur, as ruled by the AOS in August 2020. Eponymous or honorific bird names, that is birds named after or in honor of someone can be problematic for many reasons.
Fixed a crashing bug when choosing Checklist Type on the eBird export screen on some devices. The bug was only seen on iPads, but might have occurred on some larger phones
Fixed a problem where you couldn't email a checklist if there was a "/" in its name. We now remove a variety of symbols from the checklist name before saving: commas, colons, slashes, parentheses and the '&' symbol will become a dash ('-'). Backslashes, single quotes, question marks, exclamation points, asterisks and periods will be removed.
In the Summary View, you can now choose a range of dates (including times) precisely to see a summary for that timeframe. This is especially useful if you have many checklists over a long period of time. For example, you can now more easily view your observations from a subset of checklists in a previous year, like all the birds you saw between June 1 and August 31 in 2019.
Fixed a bug where eBird exports contained distances in kilometers. EBird requires import files to use miles for distance. This was a bug in Birdathon 1.4. If you exported checklists from that version and imported them into eBird, you may want to go back and fix the distance traveled for those checcklists.
In the eBird Report view, all settings are now remembered, and when you choose a checklist type (Traveling, Stationary or Incidental) your checklist is now set to be that type. One nice thing about this is that when you type a distance traveled, it’s remembered for that checklist, so you can choose “eBird Report”, type in a distance, adjust the duration, specify the number of observers and modify the location, then hit “Close” and check over your checklist before going back into eBird Report and exporting, without having to fill in that information again.
Export Checklist: You can now export a checklist summary as a .csv file for viewing in spreadsheets or importing into databases. The field names are included as the first line in the file. Every bird (and every non-bird item) in your checklist, whether observed or not, will appear in the file.
NAME – the common name of the bird (e.g. “Black Phoebe”)
IS_A_BIRD – ‘true’ for birds, ‘false’ for non-bird items (mammals, butterflies, etc.)
RARITY – the custom rarity, a number from 1 to 6, if it is set
ABA_RARITY – the rarity code from the American Birding Association, if it is set. This is the rarity of the bird in the area covered by the ABA
SORTID – a number indicating where this bird appears in the Clements taxonomy. Useful, for example, if you import your checklist into a spreadsheet and sort by NAME, RARITY or DATE_FIRST_OBSERVED. You can later sort by SORT_ID to put the list back into taxonomic order
SCIENTIFIC_NAME – the scientific name of the bird
SPEC – a four-letter code, sometimes called the banding code, of the bird if it is set. These codes come from The Institute for Bird Populations and exist for all birds in the AOS checklist
SPEC6 – a six-letter code, derived from the scientific name of the bird if it is set. These codes come from The Institute for Bird Populations. And exist for all birds in the AOS checklist
AVIBASE_ID – an identifier based on Avibase. Only birds in the AOS area will have this code as it’s pulled from the AOS checklist
COUNT – the observed count for this bird (or non-bird item)
DATE_FIRST_OBSERVED – the date and time this bird was first observed for this checklist
HEARD_ONLY – true if the bird was heard only, false if it was seen (or heard and seen)
Export Checklist: You can now export Birdathon checklists and import into any copy of Birdathon. Export files are saved in .json format. JSON files are sort of human readable, but generally they are used for importing into databases. When you import a JSON file into Birdathon you can tell it from your original checklist by looking at your Checklist Info. Near the bottom you’ll see “Imported Checklist” and some identifying information about the import. The original checklist will not show this information.
New option “Export Checklist” in the menu at the bottom right of your checklist
You can export a checklist to JSON for import back into your copy of Birdathon or for sending to another copy. Export to CSV gives you a nice summary of your checklist that you can view in a spreadsheet
Imported checklists will show the highlighted information above
Enabled bulk exporting of all checklists under Settings. Like “Export Checklist” above, it saves the files in .json format. You can later import each checklist into any copy of Birdathon. There is currently no way to bulk import checklists.
Improved the user interface for adding notes to the timeline. Timeline notes are great for showing interesting information (weather changes, events that happened while birding, location changes, etc.) and are included in the email report. If you sort your checklist by “Timeline” and add timeline notes, you get a nice narrative of your birding adventure.
Fixed a bug where the bird detail said "No Locations" even when there were locations. This also meant you couldn’t view all the observations of a single bird, so it’s a good thing this bug was fixed.
The French name will now show below the English name in the detail view for a bird, if available. These names come from the AOS and ABA checklists. When the AOS and ABA disagree, the ABA checklist french name is used (there are only a couple birds where this happens)
If you have any comments, requests or other feedback, please send me a note!