How do you record your sightings ?

Matt · Status: Offline

How do you record your sightings ?

Ste Rush · Status: Offline

Hi Matt

I personally use this

http://www.wildlife.co.uk/birding_software/Default.htm

A little bit "buggy" but all in all a reasonable product.

A lot of other people use this as a free? sightings recorder. It is usually well received.

http://www.brandonbirding.co.uk/download.asp

I too have had the dreaded comp failure losing all my data. I now back it up on to two ext hard drives along with all valuable data and photos. Worst loss was when I had the chance to meet my favourite bird artist Lars Jonsson and the photos with him was lost. He did sign some of my artwork though which was a bonus!

Hope you manage to recover some of your data. Jim Ormerod was very helpful with my sightings records for which I am eternally grateful. He had saved them in the electronic format I had sent so I was able to input some again. Have you considered having your hardrive accessed professionally to have the data recovered?

Good luck.

-- Edited by Ste Rush at 20:23, 2007-09-14

Matt · Status: Offline

Thanks for the recommendations Steve, I will check them out.

I actually no longer have the hard drive in question but I have managed to get some notes back from my rough notes taken whilst out and about. There wasn't a lot really but just interesting.

You wouldn't believe I work in the IT industry would you !!!

Hopefully, I will be getting out and about again soon now that my 3 month old daughter is a bit more settled. I look forward to joining the club and hopefully getting to some meetings and rambles.

Thanks again

Matt

Tony Cooper · Status: Offline

Matt

The East Lancashire Ornithologists' Club has a Database, which is actually an Excel spreadsheet because more people have that than Access. It allows quick data entry and also enables records to be sorted by species, date, location etc.

The database is available free of charge to any interested birder, the only condition being that users promise to submit records to their club and/or county recorder. If you (or other viewers) are interested, please email me at tony.cooper@eastlancsornithologsts.org.uk with you own email address and I will email it to you. Obviously you do need to have Excel (part of Microsoft Office) installed. The database' is 366KB and the instructions (in Word) are 75KB, so will not take long to download.

Hope this helps

Tony Cooper
Chairman ELOC

JimOrmerod · Status: Offline

Hi Matt -

Tony's suggestion is a good one and there is a variation on this - on the ELOC site there is a facility for entering your records. Although it was aimed initially at the ELOC sites, the invitation was extended to include Rossendale sites too. If you record at sites that are missing from the site, I can easily set them up.

You can download your records in CSV format if I remember correctly and I can download any records for Rossendale sites to use for the ROC report.

Personally I use an Access database that I designed specifically to help in storing data for the report. In view of the records for other groups than birds that people log on this forum, I'm in the process of extending it to cover these.

I also use a product called MapMate, which can produce maps of your records. It has species lists for just about any group you might want to record, though it was geared more towards recording insect groups originally. It has very good querying capabilities (especially if you know SQL) but it isn't hot on actual paper reports. It is pretty reasonable at £25 though and worth a look at www.mapmate.co.uk

Whatever you use (other than ELOC's online facility) you need to back up your data religiously (at least every Sunday, preferably every day). In these days of cheap usb clip drives and external hard drives it is simplicity itself.

-- Edited by JimOrmerod at 20:45, 2007-09-16