A Demonstration of the Software

Mr. Thomas Southerland has kindly provided us with his sightings database, which we edited slightly to use in demonstrating some of the features of BirdBase, BirdArea, and EditData. You can see from the database sightings and inclusive life list counts, shown below on the BirdBase main menu, that Tom is a very serious birder. (He continues to enter historic and current data in his database and by the beginning of March, 1998 these counts had increased to 31701 and 3559). What you cannot see is that, when the program runs, pointing at a button for a second or two produces a box attached to the button and containing a brief explanation of what the button does.



Although Tom has already been to the Galapagos several times, let us pretend he is contemplating another trip there. To help decide if he really wants to go he starts BirdArea, whose main menu follows. Note that one of its options is to display the How do I...? window, which has detailed instructions for carrying out every BirdArea procedure. BirdBase and EditData also have How do I...? windows. It should also be said that all the programs allow dates to be in a day-month-year format and the year to be anywhere in the range 1900 to 2100.



BirdArea will determine what birds Tom might expect to see in the Galapagos, and which of them he has already seen there, or elsewhere. Clicking the List button on its main menu produces the window shown next.



Remembering that the code for the Galapagos is GS, he types GS and the program verifies he got it right by echoing Galapagos. If he did not remember he could expose a list of codes by clicking the triangle; you will see examples of a code list later. Clicking OK, he then sees the next window.



After making the choices shown then again clicking OK, BirdArea reads its data for the ranges of nearly 10000 species, plus Tom's data of almost 30000 BirdBase sightings, and produces the Galapagos check list in about two seconds (on a 100 MHz Pentium computer with 16 Mb of RAM). Its first page is shown next. This is what the letters beginning certain lines mean:

o means he has already seen the species outside the Galapagos
w means he has already seen the species within the Galapagos
b means he has already seen the species both outside and within the Galapagos
W means he has already seen the species within the Galapagos and the species is endemic to the Galapagos
E (found on later pages of the check list) means the species is endemic to the Galapagos



Concluding that there are still a number of interesting birds he has not yet seen, Tom takes the fictitious trip to the Galapagos and records his sightings on a BirdArea printout similar to the above, except that for each species it has spaces for multiple check marks and for field notes. When he returns, before starting BirdBase to enter his sightings he again starts BirdArea and makes it specify a "short list" of species for BirdBase containing the species of the Galapagos. He does so by using the option you will find on the BirdArea main menu. Then he starts BirdBase, clicks Enter on its main menu, and sees the window below in which he begins entry of the sightings of his first day in the Galapagos.

If a word or phrase typed in the Description line will be used frequently it can be stored in a word/phrase list. That list can also be used to put a stored word or phrase in the Description line to avoid typing it. Note the code list which, this time, he uses to enter the Galapagos code. There is also a date list which always holds today's date plus the date last entered, and speeds entry of dates. After closing the code list and clicking OK, the first of a number of pages listing the world's bird species and families appears. Tom clicks the Exchange button and they are exchanged for the species and families of the Galapagos, as shown next.



The letter I preceding a species on these pages means it is on Tom's inclusive life list. The symbol > means the species has already been entered for this day's trip; note at the top that nine have been. The tenth species of the day is the Mottled Petrel, which is hilighted. Its Sequence Number, near the top of the window, shows that the Mottled Petrel is the 16th species of the 2nd family of the 8th order of the taxonomical sequence of all the world's birds. He finds it by inspection, clicks the line it is on, then clicks Use. (Alternatively, he could just double-click the line. And he could employ the Com.Find or Sci.Find button to hilight the line almost instantaneously by searching for its common or scientific name when the species isn't very easy to find by inspection.) Doing this produces a window in which he types the following note about the sighting.



Tom has defined the S1 appearing at the beginning of the note to mark a sighting as one in which the bird was photographed. But users can define the S1 thru S4 markers in any way they wish. After finishing the note, he clicks OK and then is back at the species/families pages where he enters the next species of the day. If he saw a species out of its normal range this will be very apparent since the species will not be found on the Galapagos short list. If so, he clicks the Exchange button to replace the short list with the full world list, enters the sighting with a note describing it in detail because it is important, then clicks Exchange once more before entering the remaining sightings. When finished he clicks Quit and is back at the BirdBase main menu to enter his other Galapagos sightings, which he does.

Now comes the real fun -- displaying sightings! Tom clicks Display from the main menu to produce the display menu seen in the next window.



In the display menu Tom has made choices which will yield a life list for whatever part of the world is specified by the Geographic limitation he imposes in the window that will be shown next. This is because he has chosen a One per species limitation so that BirdBase will display the first sighting of each species in that part of the world from before he started collecting sightings (which is 1-1-50 the earliest day of the default date range) until now (which was 6-30-97 when he displayed his sightings) then go on to the next species. Observe that there are a large number of choices to make on this menu. Since many of these each lead to a large number of other choices, a very large number of different lists can be produced by the program.


Tom entered the code for the Galapagos. He could have tightened the geographic limitation by typing in the name of a particular island in the Galapagos group, or getting it from the word/phrase list if it had been stored there, but he chose not to do so. After he clicks OK the program takes about four seconds to display his Galapagos life list, whose first page is shown below.



F means a sighting is his first of the species anywhere. S1 marks a sighting as one in which the bird was photographed (it is used to display only photographed species). Numbers like 07 01 017 are taxonomic sequence numbers.

With proper choices in the display menu Tom could have made his Galapagos life list show only the first line of each sighting note, or show only the lines containing the common and scientific names, or just count the number of species on the list (such a count appears at the end of the list in any case). But he wanted to look at everything. After he has done so, he clicks Quit to return to the BirdBase main menu.

Since the Mottled Petrel sighting note aroused his interest, he starts EditData to inspect the range of the species. That program's main menu looks much like the main menu of BirdBase or BirdArea. Clicking its Edit button produces a window that lists the world's bird species in much the same way as the window, seen above, lists the Galapagos species. He clicks Com.Find on that window and the window below appears.



Tom does not need to type Mottled Petrel. He can ignore capitalization and spaces (as well as hyphens and apostrophes if they were present) and type only a few appropriately chosen consecutive letters located anywhere in the name. (In a scientific name find he would need to type only the first syllable of the genus without capitalizing it, type a space, then type the first syllable of the species.) When he clicks OK Mottled Petrel is immediately hilighted on the window listing the bird species. He clicks Use on that window and then sees the next window.


This shows the first third of a panel which contains codes for the major world oceans, every nation in the world (with one for each major faunal zone of China, Indonesia, Mexico, and Russia), almost all islands or island groups that are important to birders, every Canadian province, and every U.S. state. The visible part of the panel shows that the Mottled Petrel's range includes Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, and Canada (specifically, British Columbia, as can be seen when the code list is not in the way). The other two thirds give the remainder of the species' range.

The window can also be used by Tom to change the range of the species, if change is required. In addition, EditData allows Tom to change the nomenclature and taxonomy in the list of world bird species used by BirdArea. And facilities that let a user make any possible change in the BirdBase list of world species are built into that program, as is illustrated next.

Here Tom is about to click the mouse to start the BirdBase Group move facility. A few more clicks is all it will take him to move every species in an entire genus, or family, or order to a new location in the taxonomic sequence (as well as the family name or names if he moves a family or an order). The reason why Tom might want to make such major changes in the taxonomical sequence are described in the ADDITIONAL INFORMATION link (see below).

Whenever Tom uses any of the BirdBase facilities to change the nomenclature or taxonomy in its list of world species the program then makes whatever changes are needed in the sightings already entered so that they will conform to the new species list. No action is required of Tom in making such changes except for a species split where the program displays the sightings of the split species and, for each, ask him which of the two species produced by the split should get the sighting.