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| You might be in Find mode. If so, click the Cancel Find button. |  |
| You might be in Print-Preview mode. If so, click the Exit Preview button. |  |
Two reasons come to mind.
Sometimes I can find a bird and sometimes I can't.
There are two kinds of searches.
Sometimes, when just learning Bird Brain, it's easy to confuse the two kinds of searches. But now you understand it. Right?
How can I make a life list for a specific city?
First make a Found Set of records for that city. Here's how.
Next click the Make Life List button. This limits the list to the earliest record of each species. And voila! That's your life list for that city.
When I print a life list, I don't get the whole list!
To print a checklist or other list, click the Print icon at the top right of the page. A Print dialog box will open.
If the Print dialog box doesn't look like image above, click on the arrow icon to the right of the Printer field, and the dialog box will expand.
Choose whether you want to print All or a range of pages, and click the Print button. If you want all the pages to print, check All.
Be sure you also check Records being browsed if you want to print the entire Found Set. For a Sightings List report, this is usually what you want, as it will print all the records on the list.
Current record means you want to print just one record, the current active record. If you're in the Sighting Record view, you'll print the record you're currently viewing. If you're in a list, you'll print a list with only one record on it, the currently highlighted record.
For more details, see All About Printing.
One of my ABA-area birds does not appear on my ABA life list.
To be eligible for a life list, a record has to have a valid date. Bird Brain looks at all the records and selects the earliest dated sighting for each species. If you don't know the date, you'll need to guess, or make up a date. (Some users enter their birth date for their earliest life birds, from before they started recording dates.)
A bird in Bird Brain has its name spelled differently from my field guide.
Bird Brain is based on the names in Clements world list. Inevitably, there will be discrepancies between lists compiled by different people. If the Clements list itself is wrong, it will eventually be corrected in an update. Whenever that happens, Bird Brain will automatically update the information, and all your records will update at that time.
Targetlist doesn't agree with life list
Targetlists only show species that are on that state or nation's checklist. But a Make Life List will create a lifelist from any Found Set. For example, say you entered Ostrich in a record and had the state as New York. Then Ostrich would appear on a New York lifelist. But it would not appear on a New York targetlist. And your two totals would not agree.
Should I enter records in chronological order?
Bird Brain does not care what order you enter your records in.
You can begin by entering the birds you saw today, and enter older sightings tomorrow. Bird Brain will use the sighting date you enter in the record to sort out the chronology.
Yes. From the Records menu, click Renumber Sighting Records. Bird Brain will renumber all your records so that they start with Number 1 and leave no gaps in the sequence. This is not necessary to the operation of Bird Brain, but the function is available if you want it.
How do I save my work in Bird Brain?
Bird Brain automatically saves your work whenever it is inactive for five seconds. You don't have to choose Save from a menu.
If you have just entered a whole lot of records when the dog unplugs your computer for you, all of your records should still be intact.
However, you still need to back up your database. For safety, back it up to some device exernal to your computer. See the section on Backing up.
What are the files in the Bird Brain Folder?
When you first download Bird Brain, you will see three files in the Bird Brain Folder.
Bird Brain 6.3 (the cartoon bird icon) is the file you use to launch the program. Please drag it to your dock. This is the runtime version of the FileMaker application. It appears as the name on the Application menu (the one to the right of the Apple menu) when you are running Bird Brain. In the folder, if your preferences are set to show extensions, it may appear as Bird Brain 6.3.app.
Bird Brain Records.USR is the file that contains your sighting data and the structure of the database. This is the file you copy to back up your database.
Bird Brain User Guides is a folder that contains the PDF files that you access from the Bird Brain Help menu.
Can I rename or move the Bird Brain files?
Please leave the files in the Bird Brain 6.3 Folder alone! They need to stay in their respective folders and stay named as they are for the program to work properly.
Bird Brain 6.3 Folder is a unique name that helps identify the files inside. It's best to leave it as it is, as well as the files it contains.
Does Bird Brain know all the ABA Areas and Regions?
No. Bird Brain assigns an area or region based on what's in the Nation field. However, sometimes a nation straddles two Areas or Regions. Examples are Russia and Turkey, which are partly in the Europe and Western Palearctic Area and partly in the Asian Area. Bird Brain may choose the wrong Area for a particular location within such a country.
Also, Bird Brain does not know every island. Records for some islands will not be automatically assigned an Area or Region in the Auxiliary Info tab of the Sighting Record view, even though they do belong to those Areas or Regions.
Bird Brain's automatic Area and Region choices are best guesses, and you can override them if necessary. For some parts of the world, such as those mentioned above, you may need to monitor the Area and Region fields and change what is automatically entered.
Note: Bird Brain does know that Hawaii is in the AOU Area and not in the ABA Area. If you have records for which the Nation is chosen as US and the State/Prov as HI, you will find those records represented on an AOU lifelist but not on an ABA lifelist.
For the automatic Area and Region assignment to work at all, what's entered in the Nation field must agree with what's in the drop-down menu. If it doesn't, Bird Brain won't be able to choose the ABA areas or Regions for that record.
The utility, Nation Names to Normalize, found in the Nations checklist menu, will find any records in which the Nation names are missing or not "normal."
For more details on the precise description of ABA Areas and Regions, please visit the ABA's website, ABA Listing Areas.
Can I use Bird Brain on two computers?
Yes. You might want to enter records in a laptop you travel with and then transfer the records into your desk computer when you return home. You will find detailed instructions in the User Guide, under Import and export Found Set records.
I've recently bought a Mac. Can I tranfer records from AviSys to Bird Brain?
We can do a custom import of your Avisys data. The fee is usually $20. If you want to send us a file with your data in it, we will take a look at it and tell you if it will work. No charge for looking. Here's how to do the proper export of your data from Avisys:
If you have a big file (thousands of records), email us for how to transfer the records to us.
Can I convert records from other programs to Bird Brain?
Please email us a sample of your exported data as a spreadsheet. A tab- or comma-delimited text file or an Excel worksheet would be great. Please include field names, as column headings, so we know what the data means.
We'll take a look at your data and see if we can format it for Bird Brain. No charge for us to look at your data. If we can do a conversion, we'll let you know, and we'll let you know how much it would cost. (Usually $20.) Then you can decide whether you wish to ask us to do the conversion for you.
Contact the authors / publisher
Phone 800-779-7256 or 641-472-7256
Write to us at:
Birdwatching Dot Com
2197 236th Blvd.
Fairfield, IA 52556
USA
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Opening Bird Brain