Scythebill 18.0 - Trips! and one-step, no-export Wildlife Recorder imports!

Scythebill 18.0.0 is now available, with a couple of big new features!

For all users, Scythebill now supports the notion of trips - recording sightings for a trip that lasted more than just a single day. You can also organize old visits into trips - and Scythebill can automate that for work for you too.

And for Wildlife Recorder users, you can now import into Scythebill right from Wildlife Recorder's own .mdb files.  No need to run painstaking separate exports for each country - you can import an entire taxonomy's records in one go, right from Scythebill, without even opening Wildlife Recorder!

The trip feature required a lot of changes in the guts of Scythebill, so I'm more worried about bugs than I am in a typical release. I'd call this a "beta" release of Scythebill. If you're not specifically interested in either of these features, you might hold off on this release for a bit.

As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Update: Scythebill 18.0.1 and 18.0.2 each added a few quality improvements to 18.0.0.  See notes about those releases at the end.

Trips!

Scythebill has long let users enter sightings with vague dates - "December 2015", or just "2010".  But there wasn't a way to record sightings for a trip that was a bit precise, but not a single date - say, "November 11-15, 2017".  This was particularly awkward for users importing data from birding software that leaned heavily on this (like Wildlife Recorder).

Now, Scythebill can store sightings attached to a "Trip" - a location with a start date and an end date.  There's a new "Browse by trips" page in Scythebill that lets you see all of your sightings by trip:

The new Browse by trips page.

This page lets you view trips, delete them, merge them, and create trip reports using all the sightings and the new "Trip notes" feature.  And it's got a handy button - Automatically create trips... - which can quickly gather all of your existing sightings in Scythebill into a list of trips.

You can also see your trips in Browse by location, and enter new sightings as trips.

You can also mix and match using visits and trips if you want.  This way, you can enter yet another trip with Rock Pigeon and House Sparrow without carefully tracking the location, while keeping exact dates and places - as visits - for more special species.  If the visits you enter fall within the date range you've given, those sightings will automatically be included in the trip.

I'm hoping to add more features over time to Trips. If you've got ideas, let me know!

Wildlife Recorder one-step imports

After decades of support for the birding community, Wildlife Recorder is no longer being supported.  Scythebill has long offered support for importing from Wildlife Recorder, but it's been lacking in some ways (none of the trip data was supported by Scythebill), and it required repeated per-country exports from Wildlife Recorder, followed by repeated per-country imports into Scythebill.  This was all a bit fiddly.

Now, it's one step in Scythebill, and zero steps in Wildlife Recorder:  Scythebill can import directly off of the .mdb files that Wildlife Recorder used for its storage.  You don't need to be on Windows, or even have access to the Wildlife Recorder software. If you've got a backup of the Wildlife Recorder data, that'll work too - the .mdb files are right there in the backup's .zip file.

And Scythebill imports more data than it used to - trip data and observer names, for instance - and does a much better job of creating locations only when needed.  It'll even automatically use either the IOC or eBird/Clements taxonomy data from inside Wildlife Recorder depending on which taxonomy you have selected in Scythebill/

If you use non-bird taxonomies in Wildlife Recorder, each of those has its own .mdb file, so you will need to do one import per taxonomy.  But you can keep all of your data across all taxonomies in a single Scythebill file!

If you try this and find any data missing that you expected, please let me know.  I've had to reverse-engineer how Wildlife Recorder stored its data from a couple of examples, but in particular didn't have any examples of sighting "pinpoints" or media usage.

Other changes and fixes

• The front page of Scythebill has been updated a bit to include the new "Browse by trip" button, as well as putting "Manage taxonomies" up front.
• Canadian users had issues importing eBird checklist files. This is fixed.
• Scythebill should do a better job of getting imported sightings to the "right" location for how Scythebill organizes sightings (e.g., Papua being imported to Australasian Indonesia, the Galapagos Islands being imported there instead of as a state of mainland Ecuador, etc.).
• Scythebill's also better at supporting alternate country names (St Lucia instead of Saint Lucia, for example).
• Imports with subspecies data are handled better when there are differences between the current taxonomy in Scythebill and the taxonomy of the original software.
• 18.0.1: Wildlife Recorder .mdb file imports were broken on MacOS; they now work there as well.
• 18.0.1: You can edit sightings inside Browse by trips.
• 18.0.1: When editing trip info, there's a Trip sightings... button to take you straight into "Enter sightings" for the trip.
• 18.0.1: For Browse by trips, if a species has just one sighting, you no longer get a bunch of screen space taken up by a list with that one sighting - rather, you're taken straight into a sighting editing panel.  This should save a click in many circumstances.
• 18.0.1: The installer now works on Fedora Linux
• 18.0.2: Browse by trips now has a chooser to select between showing species only, eBird/Clements groups, or subspecies. 
• 18.0.2: A number of issues with cutting and pasting sightings in Browse by location have been fixed.
• 18.0.2: An error seen by multiple users when changing reporting options in Show reports has been fixed.
• 18.0.2: Trip reports have mildly tweaked formatting, leaning more on tabs and using a few less new lines.
• 18.0.2: Trip reports generated from Show reports now have trip informatio

Scythebill 17.2 - IOC 15.1 taxonomy

Scythebill 17.2.0 is now available.  This release includes the IOC 15.1 taxonomy, and several bug fixes - mostly for eBird imports. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

IOC 15.1 taxonomy

The IOC 15.1 taxonomy was finalized a couple of days ago, and is now available in Scythebill!

Do you like splits, and your life list growing ever larger without leaving the comfort of your armchair?  Well then, this IOC taxonomy release is ... not the one for you.  The world taxonomies are converging on a taxonomy via the Working Group on Avian Checklists, and in this release IOC has un-split a number of splits that IOC offered, but eBird/Clements (and some other taxonomies) had not.

As a result, you're likely to see your IOC life list shrink a bit.  My own dropped by 11 - 13 lumps offset by just 2 splits.

My "Splits and Lumps" report

Bug fixes

There's a variety of bug fixes, mostly centered on eBird imports.

• The last version of Scythebill added support for importing "Download my data" exports straight from the .zip file.  That support didn't work on Macs;  it does now.
• eBird sightings of hybrids should now import successfully.
• eBird checklist .csv files should now import for non-English eBird users.  (I don't know if this is a recent change in eBird or a long-standing feature gap in Scythebill.)
• "New for year" import counts were incorrect when your import spanned multiple years.

Scythebill 17.1 - more spreadsheet options for reports and checklists

Scythebill 17.1.0 is now available.  This release includes some new features for report and checklist spreadsheets, and some . As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

More options for spreadsheets

When saving a report as a spreadsheet, you previously had only one "sort by" option.  It wasn't obvious, but this sorted the species, not the sightings.  If you wanted a list of species in taxonomic order, you couldn't have any sighting other than the earliest.  So if you wanted to generate a report with last-seen dates, there wasn't a great way to do it:

Old spreadsheet options

Now, you can sort both species and sightings, and the dialog has been reorganized:

New spreadsheet options

Checklist spreadsheets have added a similar option. There, the only support was showing your first sighting from the checklist area. So, if you were traveling to Peru for the first time, there wasn't a way to create a checklist that shows where you had seen those species outside of Peru. Now, you can:

New checklist spreadsheet options

There's four options for the sighting - the first sighting (if any) from Peru, the most recent (if any) from Peru, your first sighting anywhere, and the most recent sighting anywhere.

Other changes

• Wildlife Recorder imports now automatically preserve the "Very common", "Common", and "Scarce" approximate numeric counts (-3, -2, and -1 respectively) by copying that text into the sighting notes.
• Tabs in location names are no longer converted to spaces after saving and loading.
• Users who hit the previous bug and were very unlucky could get into a state where their .bsxm files were un-loadable. Scythebill now recovers from this state automatically.

Scythebill 17.0.2 and 17.0.3 - bug fixes

Scythebill 17.0.2 is now available.  This release includes no new features, only bug fixes and small improvements. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Update: Scythebill 17.0.3 included a number of additional bug fixes and small features.

Import/export fixes

• Observation.org/Waarneming imports will work once again - they changed their format to use localized strings for group names ("Vogels" instead of "Birds") and place names.
• An error message some users saw in imports while looking up locations is resolved.
• Very large eBird exports (large enough to require multiple files) would split almost all checklists across those files.  They'll now be much better at keeping checklists together in each file.
• 17.0.3: eBird files can now be imported directly from .zip files - especially useful for eBird's "MyData" mass exports, which come as .zip files.
• 17.0.3: Some CSV editing software would add "byte-order marks" to CSV files which usually don't have them, breaking imports. Scythebill now always supports these files (by ignoring the byte-order marks).
• 17.0.3: Scythebill now gives a much better error message if a provided Wildlife Recorder "locations export" file appears to be invalid.
• 17.0.3: "Observado" imports are now properly named "Observation.org".

Spreadsheet fixes

• When Scythebill picks an earliest or most recent sighting, it no longer ignore times; it is now used as a tie-breaker when dates are the same.
• Saving a multi-taxonomy checklist as a spreadsheet in Browse by location should be much faster.
• Report spreadsheets sometimes had overly wide common name, scientific name, and location columns. These should now be much more reasonably sized.
• 17.0.3: There is now a "#" column in sorted report spreadsheets, which skips uncountable taxa (like sp's, hybrids, and escapees).

Other changes

• Windows users who tried to open up Scythebill files from directly in .zip files would be unable to save;  now, they'll get a warning message as soon as the file is open, asking them to save a copy outside of the .zip.
• Scythebill will more consistently give you a good error message when you try to save into a folder that your operating system doesn't allow.
• 17.0.3: Scythebill had stopped showing "new for year" if these were the first species of any sort to be recorded that year, a common problem on Jan. 1!
• 17.0.3: Using the "even more specific?" feature for entering very specific locations would incorrectly reset the parent location to World.

Scythebill 17.0.0 - the eBird/Clements 2024 taxonomy is here!

Scythebill 17.0.0 is now available.  It's a simple release, with just one new feature - the eBird/Clements 2024 taxonomy!  As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Nov. 21 update: Scythebill 17.0.1 was released; it fixes a problem with importing from observation.org as well as from BirdJournal's eBird exports, along with some checklist improvements.

eBird/Clements 2024 taxonomy

The taxonomy was released less than a week ago, and it is a big one.  There's more than 80 splits, and some of them are extremely intricate.  House Wren is split 7 ways, Common Cicadabird 13 ways, and Island Thrush is split into 17 species!  As always, Scythebill will do much of the heavy lifting for you, making the update as painless as possible.

eBird has a long page with a wealth of details about the update, but if you want to know how it affected your list, just visit Splits and Lumps in "Special reports":

Splits and Lumps for my own list

Scythebill 16.6 - IOC 14.2, checklist printing, and native Apple silicon

Scythebill 16.6 is now available!  It's got the IOC 14.2 taxonomy, checklist printing, Birda imports, and a native Apple Silicon version. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

October 6 update: Scythebill 16.6.1 includes a couple of new features and several bug fixes.

IOC 14.2 taxonomy

The headline feature is the latest IOC taxonomy - 14.2, released earlier this month.  It's a huge revision, with splits ranging the familiar (Red Grouse from Willow Ptarmigan) to the obscure (Vella Lavella Monarch from Kolombangara Monarch), to the big (a 7-way split of House Wren) and the absurdly big (a 17-way split of Island Thrush).  And there's some lumps as well - for those of us who've spent time in the Palearctic, all the Redpolls are lumped.  You can see the full list of taxonomic changes on the IOC site.

As always, Scythebill will handle much of the work for you automatically.  Once you're done, visit the Splits and Lumps report under Special Reports, and see what changed for your list:

Changes to my list in 14.2

(Scythebill 16.6.1 fixes a slightly incorrect mapping for the three-way Rock Martin split.)

Checklist printing

There's a new option when viewing a location checklist in Browse by location:  Print...

This gives you a way to print out a checklist without carefully formatting a spreadsheet, including a compact form which takes up very little space.

A compact checklist for Grenada

(Scythebill 16.6.1 fixes an error that affected some printed checklists for locations you'd already visited.)

Native support for Apple Silicon (16.6.1)

For the last several years, Apple has released Macs using their own CPUs, starting with the M1 (then M2, M3, and M4 today), collectively called "Apple silicon".  Scythebill runs fine on these, but only by built-in emulation software called Rosetta.  Rosetta's free and installed on-demand, but relying on it means software runs more slowly and uses more memory than if it ran natively.

With 16.6.1, Scythebill now offers a native Apple silicon download.  In my informal tests, this version starts up twice us fast as the previous version. If you're using an old Mac, no worries - I'll continue releasing Scythebill to support older CPUs.

Birda imports (16.6.1)

Birda is a relatively recent site supporting in-the-field bird sighting entry.  Scythebill now supports importing Birda exports. Even if you don't use Scythebill, this could be used to move data from Birda to eBird -Birda exports require a lot of work to transform into a form acceptable by eBird, and Scythebill will handle that for you.

Small features and fixes

There's a new preference "Show extinct taxa?".  It's enabled by default, but you can turn it off if you'd rather not see extinct species and subspecies in Scythebill.  (If you've been fortunate enough to see a species that is now extinct, it will still be shown.)

Observado imports should more consistently include latitude and longitude. (At least some countries used "lon" as an abbreviation for longitude instead of "lng".)

As a very minor tweak: if you sort report spreadsheets by date, and there are multiple observations with that same date, those observations will be sorted in taxonomic order.

Scythebill 16.5 - multi-taxonomy spreadsheets

Scythebill 16.5 is now available!  There's new features for creating spreadsheets across all taxonomies in one go, and an important fix to importing.  As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Update: Scythebill 16.5.1 was released on July 8th - it fixes one bug with multi-taxonomy checklist spreadsheets.

One spreadsheet, all taxonomies

Before this version, if you wanted to create checklists or save a report as a spreadsheet, it would only export one taxonomy at a time.

Now, there's a new option, both in Show reports and Browse by location, "Include all taxonomies?".   If you choose Export sightings... ... to a spreadsheet, or you save a location checklist with Save as spreadsheet..., you'll get this new option.

When you use this option, the spreadsheet will have separate sheets for each taxonomy:

Example report spreadsheet

Totals in saved checklists

At the top of a checklist spreadsheet, you'll see a summary line outlining how many species are on the checklist, as well as how many are endemic, possible lifers, and how many you've recorded in that location.

A Taiwan checklist - my birding there was limited to the airport. (11 species isn't so bad, considering!)

This is the same summary line that shows up atop Browse by locations, though in this release I've tried to improve that (and this) text to be more self-explanatory.

Other changes

One important bug fix: an error message could appear during location resolution while importing sightings.  (This was introduced in Scythebill 16.4.)