About BUBO Listing
BUBO Listing is a new approach to an old activity; comparing birding lists. Whilst frowned upon by the more serious-minded, bird listing is as vibrant, active and exciting as ever. Put two birders in a room together and before too long they'll know if the other saw the 2006 Long-billed Murrelet in Devon!
There have been a number of attempts to enable comparison of lists on the internet, some local and others at the national level or wider. Whilst all have positive sides, they all have disadvantages too. BUBO Listing is an attempt to provide a free, flexible and widely used site for the comparison of birding lists. The more people that use BUBO Listing, the better it will become for all users.
Advantages of BUBO Listing
- BUBO Listing is free.
- BUBO Listing is immediate. As soon as you update your list, it is there for the world to see.
- BUBO Listing has no elitist threshold - you can enter a list of a single bird upwards and do not need to be a top twitcher to benefit.
- BUBO Listing is entirely transparent - you can view anything submitted by anyone else.
- BUBO Listing is very flexible in the types of lists submissible (e.g. life, year, county/state, self-found), whilst also retaining sufficient structure to enable meaningful comparison of lists.
- BUBO Listing's data entry is fast and easy so it is little effort for you to input and update lists.
- BUBO Listing uses the most appropriate checklists for each location, so you can use Clements for World lists, ABA for USA, BOU for Britain etc.
- You can create a list for any location worldwide*, even down to your own garden or back yard!
- BUBO Listing puts you in charge of your lists. No-one will be making decisions about what you can and can't count.
In short, the idea is that you can log in and input a full bird list on the system - not just the total, but the complete composition of the list, ideally along with a date and location for each species. The list might represent a Life List covering Great Britain, or a Year List covering an English county such as Norfolk, or a US state such as New Jersey. The location can be anywhere from the entire World down to your own garden or yard - and you can set up new sites or patches yourself. The birder can also record lists representing only self-found or photographed birds, as well as 'bigby' lists. Of course, one of the perennial questions in listing is deciding which species are acceptable to count; to allow flexibility here BUBO Listing is not prescriptive but allows lists based on a number of 'authorities', such as Clements, IOC, AOU, ABA, BOU.
Having entered a list (or lists), you can then obviously view those lists, and update them as you discover new species. However, the added advantage of the system is that you can compare your lists with those of other birders using BUBO Listing. This is not just restricted to a basic comparison of totals; you can look at the detail of anyone else's lists. If you're interested in Fred Blogg's 2007 Northamptonshire Year List, you can go in and look at which species were involved, and where and when they were recorded. It is important to note that BUBO Listing does not vet individual records, comments or claims made: any claim a lister makes is freely available for all other listers to see. We may however contact the lister if an unusual record (or a potentially libellous comment!) is brought to our attention and we believe that an error may have been made.
But BUBO Listing is even more powerful than that. You can also query lists by species. For example, if you wished to find out how many BUBO Listers had seen Siberian Rubythroat in Britain, this would be a few clicks of the mouse away. You could then even see when and where those lucky few had added it to their lists. Similarly, whilst keeping your year list, you might want to keep an eye on your key remaining target species. BUBO Listing makes it possible to see which species you still need to see, but that most of your fellow listers have already got.
BUBO Listing has different aims from other online bird recording systems, such as eBird and BirdTrack - see our comparison of these.
BUBO Listing Development
BUBO Listing is provided free of charge. Costs are incurred for development and hosting however, so if you enjoy BUBO Listing and would like to contribute please use the Paypal donate button on the left. (You don't even need a Paypal account.) BUBO Listing is also supported by relevant advertising, and is an affiliate of NHBS and Amazon (UK , US and Canada) - if you are buying any bird books (or other goods) then we would appreciate it if you could buy them through the BUBO store so that we receive a small commission!
System Requirements
BUBO Listing requires an Internet browser with Javascript enabled. Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Opera 10 and Google Chrome 5 are all recommended. Screen resolution should be set to at least 1024 pixels wide.
Photographs
Photos used throughout the BUBO Listing website have been provided mainly by the following photographers:
- Mike Prince, www.bubo.org/gallery
- Andy Musgrove
- Paul Bowerman, www.severnsidebirds.co.uk
- John Martin
Copyright remains with the original photographer. If you wish to use any of these photos, whether electronically or in print, contact BUBO Listing and we will put you in touch with the particular photographer. We welcome photographs from our users, so if you wish to contribute any of your own then please also contact us.
* Not all countries are supported yet
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