BIRDER'S DIARY 2.5

THAYER BIRDING SOFTWARE

(Review Updated 9-30-99)

INTRODUCTION

Birder's Diary 2.5 contains four taxonomies; a mapping CD-ROM to chart United States sightings; world-wide range data; a routine to cross reference bird names in the different taxonomies (the "Rosetta Stone"); downloads to convert and transfer AviSys and/or BirdBase/BirdArea entries; and periodic updates on its web-site (http://www.thayerbirding.com/BD3_home.htm). Birder's Diary also allows direct access to its Birds of North America. However, Birder's Diary pays a price for all this; it is very slow. (As faster computers become less expensive, this could become less of an issue; so long as the upgrades do not further slow the program.)

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

To quote Thayer's web site ( http://www.thayerbirding.com/BD3_home.htm ):

While Birder's Diary will physically run with a 486 processor, it is a painful thing to watch!

The recommended minimum requirements for Birder's Diary are a Pentium 120 processor with 32 Mb of RAM, and Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT. Thayer states that Mac users can run Birder's Diary and Birds of North America on Power Macs that emulate Windows or with Softwindows 5.0 or Virtual PC 2.0. (I suspect, but have not verified, that the result would be ponderously slow.) Birder's Diary and Birds of North America both contain video clips which require at least a 4X CD-ROM drive, a video card supporting at least 256 colors, and a sound card.

COST/OPTIONS

Birder's Diary lists for $140.00, while Birds of North America lists for $70.00. The current combination sells for less than did the prior combination ($245.00). This is, in part, because Birder's Diary 2.5 now includes Sibley's Birds of the World; it had been an additional add-on.

INSTRUCTIONS/INSTALLATION

Installation is simple even though Birder's Diary does not include a bound user's guide.(One can be printed via Microsoft Word from the Birder's Diary CD.) Rather, it uses video clips to show you how it works. These include "How to add [or edit] sightings"; "How to work with taxonomic lists"; "How to customize, view, and print your life lists [and checklists]"; "How to find birds"; "How to use the map"; "What's the Rosetta Stone"; "How can I enter and use seasonal abundance codes"; "I didn't know you could do that!", and more. There is also a video overview by Pete Thayer, and an enhancement clip by project director Dave Diehl. (You may have to adjust your computer's volume to hear the video sound tracks.) There is a Help button on the Menu bar, the contents of which can be printed.

PRE-INPUT DECISIONS

As with all listing programs, you need to make certain decisions before you input (enter) data. You can use many observers with Birder's Diary, so be creative. For example, I keep the records of the Aircast Eagles, our World Series of Birding team. (Pete Thayer has a "Window Kill" observer.) You might create an observer called "Photographed" or, if you band birds, one called "Banded". You will probably want to make additional pre-input decisions such as defining where you bird (locations) and trips (intended to cover a continuous period of time).

You can define Observers from the "Locations, Observers, Trips" icon (one of eight on Birder's Diary's initial page) via the Observers form. This template also allows you to define the two "Sighting Checkbox Headers" and two optional "Life List" displays. The former are toggle switches for specific criteria such as "Breeding Plumage", "Heard Only", or whatever you like. The latter are the two optional list totals displayed in the lower right corner of many Birder's Diary pages. (I use ABA area and New Jersey. The third is the non-optional "World Life List".) Birder's Diary comes with all the (United) States, (Canadian) Provinces (except the newly formed Nunavut), Countries, Oceans, and Continents entered as locations. These can be supplemented via the "User-defined Locations" page in the "Locations, Observers, Trips" feature, or when you enter data in Mass Entry. (The process is the same).

Click "Locations"to access a template beginning with "Description" (your name for the site you want to define). You can, but do not have to, add its elevation and/or habitat. Next you can link this site to a Country, County, or State/Region(which you must do if you want your entries recorded in one of these areas). Thus, I created a location called "Cape May County" which I linked to New Jersey. I then created "South of the Canal" which I linked to "Cape May County." Finally, I created "Cape May Point SP" linked to "South of the Canal". The result of all this is that every time I make an entry for "Cape May Point SP", it is added to my South of the Canal, Cape May County, New Jersey, USA, etc., lists.

Birder's Diary was created by adapting Microsoft Access, as opposed to having been created from the ground up. This apparently contributes to its size and slowness. It also apparently contributes to a problem when trying to use a just created place. For example, if you bird a new area, and want to enter your data, you can go to Mass Entry (discussed below), click the Location button, and create a new location. If you then return to the Mass Entry page, this new place is shown as the location. However, unless you again highlight this venue, Birder's Diary records your data as if you had selected World, not your newly created location. Thayer is aware of this problem, and says it will be corrected by a December 1999 via a free update. (Based upon past experience, February 2000 is more realistic.)

Trips also can be defined in "Locations, Observers, and Trips" or "Mass Entry". You need to name it and when it occurred. You can also add comments, note the sponsor (if an organized trip), and how much it cost (to show how much you spent per species and life bird). If your birding takes you to many places, your Location and Trip lists can become quite long. To keep from having to scroll (or otherwise search) through an unwieldy number of locations, you can identify those you use regularly.

ENTERING DATA

Birder's Diary allows data entry via Mass Entry, Bird Search, and Sightings. Mass Entry is accessed from the Sightings icon in the middle of the main page. This presents you with a page from which you select a taxonomy (ABA, AOU, Traditional, or Sibley); how to present the species (Last/Common Name, Taxonomic, Common Name, or Scientific Name); and a geographic limitation. I typically select ABA, Taxonomic, and New Jersey. This allows me to make my entries from a taxonomic list of New Jersey's birds, much faster than selecting from all ABA, traditional, or Sibley species. I then select the location and date, and begin checking species. To find the species you want to enter, scroll through the list, or use the Find button (type in part of a common or scientific name and the applicable candidates are highlighted in order). If neither locates your species, try The "Rosetta Stone" which contains names from all four taxonomies, and in the "Alias" feature. "Alias" contains names not in the four taxonomies but which are typically found in foreign field guides (i.e.: Great Northern Diver, Europe's name for the Common Loon.) You can also add your own names to it. "The Rosetta Stone" also includes two difficulty ratings for each species. (How hard it is to find/see each.)

(While having multiple taxonomies is interesting, it creates certain problems. For example, I have been fortunate enough to bird in various countries on various continents, which means I need to select a world-wide taxonomy to record my data. Two are available. One is Sibley's very interesting but controversial list, while the other (called Traditional in Birder's Diary) is neither clearly defined nor generally accepted (as opposed to Clement's list). In Thayer's Traditional list Little Hermit is split into itself and Boucard's Hermit. I have seen the former in Trinidad and the latter in Costa Rica. Thus, my Birder's Diary life list is one greater than my (generally accepted) Clement's life list.)

Once you locate the species, clicking the "sighted?" box automatically enters "1" as the number sighted. (This is a pet peeve of mine. I do not want a number entered unless I so choose. While I can remove the number, doing so involves unnecessary, unwarranted, and unappreciated effort.) Then you can check which ever toggle switches are appropriate, add a comment (up to 35 pages long), and/or chart the location of any U.S.A. sighting with included mapping disc (see below). When you have checked all the species you want to enter, click the "Add Sightings" button (which shows you the number of species checked so you can correct any potential error before your data are entered). If you want to enter all or some of these sightings for another observer, (as we do after my wife and I have birded together), change the observer and re-click "Add Sightings". (If the observations are not identical, make the needed changes before entering them.) WARNING: if you want to make multiple, same observer entries (as for each day of a trip), you must clear one set of entries before you add new ones (or you will double enter data).

The second way to enter data is via Bird Search, accessed from the "Birds" icon (upper left of the main page). This allows you to select one of the four taxonomies, the "Alias" list, or (as discussed below) any list you have created. Again, you can further limit the list by restricting it to a geographic region. (You can also enter a user-defined filter, such as "red", which will limit the list to only species with "red" in their names.) After you find the species you want to enter (by scrolling, typing the name, or with "The Rosetta Stone"), highlight it, and click "Add Sighting(s)". This takes you to the Quick Sighting Entry page where you enter the same information as on the Mass Sightings Entry page. (However, all of the information has to be the same for each species, which is why Mass Entry is usually used). I also often have a problem entering data this way; it locks-up my computer. I first thought this was a result of my using a relatively slow machine, Pentium 133 with 16 Mb of RAM. However, I have the same problem with a Pentium 166 with 32 Mb of Ram and an AMD 350 with 128 Mb of RAM.

The third way to enter data is via the Edit Box button of the Sightings page(accessed via the Sightings icon). Clicking this button takes you to a page containing an "Add New" button which, when clicked, presents you with a page on which you can enter sightings one species at a time. The only other substantial difference between entering data on this page and the other two is that you must (boo; hiss) enter the number of species seen.

MAPPING YOUR SIGHTINGS

A unique feature of Birder's Diary is the ability to visually record where your sightings occurred with the included mapping CD-ROM.(You can do this when you enter a species, or afterwards from the Sightings page.) Click the mapping symbol (or check the map check box in Mass Entry) and the Map page is presented. Select a species, click the small globe button on the tool bar, type a nearby city, zoom in to where you saw the bird, select a color (red, yellow, blue, green, or purple), and then click where you saw the species. You can print the map directly; or save the image as a bitmap, read it into a graphics application, manipulate it, and then print it. (However, after having played with this feature for a while, I found it to be little more than a gimmick.)

CORRECTING/VERIFYING DATA

Birder's Diary does not have a dedicated verification routine, but does allow you to edit your data from 14 different groupings via the Sightings page: 1) date descending, (common) name; 2) date descending, taxonomic; 3) date, (common) name; 4) date, taxonomic; 5) location, date; 6) location, date descending; 7) (common) name, date; 8) (common) name, date descending; 9) order of entry; 10) order of entry descending; 11) taxonomic, date; 12) taxonomic, date descending; 13) trip, date; and 14) trip, date descending. Thus, if you want to check your most recent entries, "order of entry" easily lets you do so. If you are concerned that you might have erred entering a particular species, any of the "name" or "taxonomic" listings lets you easily check these. Likewise, for potential trip, location, etc., errors, you can examine your records grouped by those parameters. There is also a Filter button in the Edit Box in Sightings which allows you to limit a search to a species, date range, location, trip, comment, and/or filter.

If you find an error (or simply want to edit a record), highlight the entry (as many as you want, so long as all the edits will be identical), and then make your edit(s). However, if you want to edit a single entry, you have to include the number of individuals seen.

RANGE DATA

Birder's Diary comes with (uneditable) range data for all the states, provinces (except the recently formed Nunavut), countries, continents, and oceans; and uses it in two ways. First, for its lists (what birds you have seen) and reports (your sightings with varying amounts of entered data). Second, for its checklists (lists of what species occur where). Birder's Diary 2.5 includes (at no additional charge) the 900 page Taxonomy and Distribution of Birds of the World by Dr. Charles G. Sibley and Burt Monroe, Jr. This very interesting (albeit controversial) work contains range descriptions for 9946 species. Its primary thrust is a detailed explanation of the relationships of the world's species of birds (their taxonomy), based upon the late Dr. Sibley's revolutionary DNA-DNA Hybridization Technique.

WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING

THE FOLLOWING QUOTE IS REAL TECHNICAL:

DO NOT READ IT UNLESS YOU ARE READY TO THINK REAL HARD

The following is from the introduction to Taxonomy and Distribution of Birds of the World via Birder's Diary:

The classification used in this book was produced from comparisons among avian DNAs using the DNA-DNA hybridization technique. DNA-DNA hybridization measures the degree of genetic similarity between complete genomes by measuring the amount of heat required to melt the hydrogen bonds between the base pairs that form the links between the two strands of the double helix of duplex DNA. The comparison may be between the two DNA strands of an individual or of different individuals representing different levels of genetic and taxonomic divergence. Under experimental conditions "hybrid" double-stranded DNA molecules may be formed from the single strands of the DNAs of two species. The hybrid molecules are then dissociated ("melted") in a thermal gradient under controlled conditions such that a measure of the melting temperature of the hybrid duplex may be calculated. The experimental conditions are set so that only homologous sequences (= sequences derived from a common ancestor) can form double-stranded structures. The melting temperature of a DNA duplex molecule is a function of the number of correctly base-paired nucleotides, thus it is a measure of the degree of genetic similarity between the two single strands forming the duplex. The principal steps in the DNA-DNA hybridization technique follow: ® 1994-1996, Dr. Charles Sibley and Thayer Birding Software, Ltd.

Based upon this methodology, Taxonomy and Distribution of Birds of the World discusses why the Orders, Families, Genera, Species, etc., should be grouped as the authors suggest. The authors also discuss each such division (Orders, Families, Genera, Species, etc.,). This book is well worth the $75.00 for which Thayer used to sell it! (It is now included with Birder's Diary.)

LISTS/REPORTS

As with all true listing software, the ability to generate various lists (containing little data) and reports (containing potentially a lot of data) is the heart of the program, and Birder's Diary offers a varied selection that requires no more of you than to pick the ones you want with the variables you like. (Just keep in mind that these can take a while to generate depending, in significant part, upon your computer.) These are grouped in four topics (Location, Trip, Species, and "Really Cool") for which you must initially select an observer and a taxonomy, and for which you can choose a date range and/or a comment. The defaults are all dates and no comment. (I found the "Really Cool" to be Rather Tedious, but it is good to have a multitude of features available.)

LISTS/REPORTS

The Location and Trip "lists" show species grouped geographically by continent, country, state/province/region (or not at all); in alphabetic or taxonomic sequence, using common and/or scientific names; and in 2 or 3 column portrait or landscape format. The Species "lists" display a single species, family, or order in alphabetic or taxonomic sequence. If you select one species and the observer has seen it, the list will be limited to that species (i.e.: just the name of the species). If you select a species the observer has not seen, Birder's Diary will tell you so.

The "reports" for all three (Location, Trip, and Species) display the birds grouped geographically by continent, country, state/province/region (or not grouped at all). They can display your first sightings for the chosen location, trip or sighting; common or scientific names (not both); be sorted in alphabetic, taxonomic, date, or number seen sequence (or the reverse of any of these); and in portrait or landscape format. You can select trip, location, family name, traditional family description, Sibley family description, order name, traditional order description, or Sibley order description; and any two of your toggle switch headers, one of both difficulty codes, or the AOU number for each species. Thus, I can generate a "list" (just the names) of the 427 species I have from Costa Rica, a "report" showing where and when I first saw each (with their difficulty codes), or a "report" showing all the details of my 1835 Costa Rica sightings.

The "Really Cool" options include:

• ABA Annual Reports;
• Christmas Bird Count Reports (by taxonomic order or species totals);
• Graphic displays of species occurrence by day of the year or month; and
• Rare Bird reporting form.

You should begin your ABA Annual Reports or Lists when you are about to go out to dinner (better yet, a long weekend), as these items take a long time to generate. On the other hand, the CBC reports are straightforward, and can be used to summarize any other trips you have taken. (However, if you do not track the number of individuals of each species, there is little these reports can do.)

The graphic displays of species chart, on the top half of a page, shows the frequency of sightings by day of the year and by month while the lower half of the page tries to give the number of individuals seen. (Again, I find this option of little use, but I still like having a great variety of options from which to chose.)

CHECKLISTS

TRUE CHECKLISTS

Checklists show (or are based upon) lists of the species of specific geographic regions. Click the Checklists icon (lower left of Birder's Diary's main page), and your first option is Checklists. Select a region (pre-defined or custom made), a taxonomy, how to group them (family, order, both, or none), landscape or portrait format, and 2 or 3 columns versus a single column with 14 (portrait) or 24 (landscape) check off boxes. You can also choose to have endemics marked, have seasonal abundance graphs included (discussed below), show only those species you have not seen (a hit list), and/or mark the species on your life list(with either an "X" or by listing its number on your life list). If you show both your lifers and the species you have not seen in the location, the later are shown with those you have seen outside the area marked or numbered (depending on which you chose). You can export your checklists to spreadsheets and word processing programs. However, Birder's Diary is based upon Microsoft's data base program Access, and does not convert well to non-Microsoft products. When you convert to Microsoft Word and select columns in that program, the number of species included does not appear on the screen. Also, it does print across the right column, but obscures some species names.

CUSTOM CHECKLISTS

Custom Checklists is a feature that allows you to create your own species lists. (In prior versions of Thayer's Birds of North America, you had to do this via Birder's Diary in order to use such lists in Birds of North America's Quizzes or Avian Juke. The current version of Birds of North America allows you to create these lists without Birder's Diary.) Creating such lists is simple, but if you add a species by mistake, there is no way to remove it (other than deleting the entire list and starting over).

SEASONAL ABUNDANCE

This feature allows you to create seasonal abundance graphs that can be added to any checklist in Birder's Diary, including your Custom Checklists. The abundance feature allows you to visually indicate, in half month intervals, whether species are irregular, rare, uncommon, common, or abundant. When printed, the checklist provides only one space to check off your sightings. (More spaces would not fit

BIRD DISTRIBUTION

The Bird Distribution feature allows you to select a species from any included taxonomy, and show either the states and provinces, or the countries, in which it occurs. (You can look for species via taxonomic or alphabetic lists.

EDITING/UPDATING

Birder's Diary provides periodic, free web site updates (http://www.thayerbirding.com/BD3_home.htm ). These include taxonomic changes as they become available. However, you can not edit, add, or delete species or families, so we are dependent upon Thayer Birding Software to provide these updates. This would be cause for concern except that TBS is a well established organization with a good track record of offering regular updates and improvements for all its products, often as free web site downloads. These updates, when warranted, include a "Split Wizard" which helps you make changes to already entered sightings as required by the splitting of species. ( Because Birder's Diary uses Microsoft's Access database, it can utilize Microsoft's Wizards.)

TECHNICAL SUPPORT

Birder's Diary offers technical support on its web site (www.birding.com) via its "Knowledgebase", a listing of known problems and recommended cures. The support page also provides access to the Thayer News Group (an interactive forum for people interested in Thayer Birding Software products, often responded to by the people who designed the products), the Thayer Suggestion Box (for people with suggestions, problems and/or solutions), the Software Library (which offers various updates and other improvements), and the Telephone Support page (which explains how that feature works and what you should do to use it properly).

The Telephone Technical Support number is 888-912-BIRD, and is free for the first 30 minutes. After that, there is a $50.00 an hour fee (charged in 15 minute intervals), unless the problem was caused by a software bug. Then there is no charge regardless of the time involved. There is also no charge for the other support. Birder's Diary also has a technical support e-mail address: TechSupport@birding.com.

I have used their support once when I improperly linked locations. This caused my state lists to not include all of the species I had entered. Birder's Diary had me attach my data files to an e-mail, and e-mailed back my corrected data. While I was quite pleased with the aid provided, I suspect that underlying this problem is the fact that Birder's Diary was not designed from scratch. Rather, it uses a general database adapted for a specific use.

BACKING UP

If you are unwilling to back up your data, do not even contemplate listing software.

As the saying goes, you have either experienced a hard drive crash, or you will. While all listing programs let you back up your data, the ease with which they do so varies. When you initially exit Birder's Diary, you are asked whether you want to back up. (You are also given the option of having this page displayed every time you exit. DO SO!!!) If you do not, it will be all too easy to forget to back up and all your hard data entry work (not to mention your sanity) could be history. The standard Birder's Diary back up process involves putting a 3.5 disc into the appropriate Drive (probably "A"), and saving your data to it. You can then keep this disc in a safe place away from your computer. (Should there be a fire, you do not want both your computer and your backed up data to be lost.)

Backing up Birder's Diary is very simple until your data exceed the capacity of a 3.5 inch floppy disc (about 1.44 Mb or roughly 10,000 sightings). If you have compression software, you can compress the data and then store it on a disc. If not, you can use a process that comes with Windows 95 (of which you may or may not be aware). It is not a difficult procedure, but must be followed very carefully. (It also allows you to transfer data from one computer to another, which is another way to avoid losing data to a hard drive crash. ) This is initially a one step process, but involves another step if you want to transfer your data to another computer or to restore it.

How to do this is written in detail as a post script to this review.

In summary, Birder's Diary offers many features, including periodic web-site updates ( http://www.thayerbirding.com/BD3_home.htm), and is designed to be used with Thayer's Birds of North America. Birder's Diary also offers a free download with which you can convert and transfer BirdBase/BirdArea and/or AviSys entries into Birder's Diary. However, Birder's Diary is slow. As computers become faster and less expensive, this should become less of an issue, so long as future updates do not slow further down the program. On a scale of 0 (truly worthless) to 10 (the outer limit of human ability), I rate Birder's Diary at 8½ and recommend it.

Michael R. Hannisian

September 30, 1999

P.S.: How to back up and restore with Windows 95:

Step One; Backing Up:

• Back up Birder's Diary into a folder on your main drive (probably Drive "C"). (Any folder will do, so long as you remember its name.) The files will be called "Bird_bck.mdb" and "BIRD_BCK.ldb".
• From your Windows 95 desktop, double click "My Computer", and then right mouse click the drive in which Birder's Diary is installed (again, probably Drive "C").
• Click "Properties" at the bottom of the list you are shown, which will take you to that page.
• Click the Tools tab at the top of the Properties (General tab) page, and then click "Backup Now..." in the middle of the right side of the Properties (Tools tab) page.
• In the left column, double click the symbol for your main drive (probably "C"), which will generate, in the right column, a list of all folders on that drive.
• Double click on the folder in which you backed up your Birder's Diary data, which will cause the files in that folder to appear in the right column (replacing what was there).
• To the left of each file will be a box. Click the boxes next to your back up files ("Bird_bck.mdb" and "BIRD_BCK.ldb"), and click the Next Step> button in the upper right of the page.
• This will generate a page limited to a column of your drives. After placing a 3.5 inch disc into the appropriate drive (probably Drive "A"), double click the symbol for that drive and then click the "Start Backup" button in the upper right.
• You are presented with a "Backup Set Label" box into which you type the name of the data file("Bird_bck.mdb") and click OK.
• Your computer will now automatically back up these files onto the 3.5 inch disc.

Step Two; Restoring:

• Place the 3.5 inch disc onto which you have backed up your Birder's Diary data into the appropriate drive (probably Drive "A").
• On your Windows 95 desktop, double click "My Computer", and then right mouse click the drive into which you have placed the back up disc.
• Click "Properties" at the bottom of the list, which will take you to that page.
• Click the Tools tab at the top of the Properties (General tab) page, and then click "Backup Now..." in the middle of the right side of the Properties (Tools tab) page.
• Click the Restore tab at the top left of this page.
• In the left column, double click the symbol for your 3.5 inch disc drive (probably "A"), which will present the back up file name (with a QIC suffix) in the right column.
• Click the Next Step> button in the upper right which will cause various items to appear in both columns, with boxes to the left of each.
• In the right column, click the box left of the name of the drive into which Birder's Diary (probably Drive "C") is installed, and then click the Next Step> button in the upper right of the page.
• This will restore your data to that drive (but not to Birder's Diary).
• Now open Birder's Diary and click Options on the Menu bar; then click "Restore your data" and you will be asked if you really want to do this. (Restoring data replaces all your current data. If the new data are not up to date or are otherwise defective, this would be a problem.)
• Click "yes" and you will be shown a Window from which you select the folder containing your back up files. Do so and then click OK. Your data will now be restored to Birder's Diary.
• Close Birder's Diary (no need to back up this time), and reopen it to verify that your data have been restored.