Scythebill 20.4: faster and better sighting entry!

Scythebill 20.4 is now available! The biggest change in this release is a top-to-bottom refresh of "Enter sightings", along with smarter checklists that use eBird data for the month you're birding. There are also range maps built right into species information, some improvements to itinerary planning, and the usual pile of smaller fixes. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

AviList heads-up

The next release should include the eBird/Clements 2026 update and AviList 2026. I'd said earlier that I expected to release just a single taxonomy this year, but eBird and AviList convergence isn't as complete as I'd hoped, with about 30 species-level differences; less than eBird vs. IOC, but not few enough to ignore. My expectation now is that I'll replace IOC with AviList, which will make the update take a bit longer to arrive.

Entering sightings, refreshed

"Enter sightings" hasn't had a real makeover in a long time, and it was overdue. There's a lot of changes, but here's the big ones:

• Fewer pages: Visit details (or trip details) now sit right on the first page, so you don't have to click "Next" repeatedly. If your screen is too narrow for side-by-side, the details drop to the bottom in an expandable section, and the whole screen scrolls.
  
  
  
  
  
• Cleaned up layout, showing more species on the page: the species info is on the right (if your screen is wide enough - otherwise it gets moved to the bottom).
  
  

  

  
  
• Refreshed appearance with much more information: there's not just a new look, but "Sighting" and "Highlights" columns that show much more of the per-species information, as well as badges like "Endemic" or "New for ...". 
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Other taxonomies inline: if you've entered sightings for more than one taxonomy, all the other ones show at the bottom, and you can switch to that taxonomy with a single click.

Entering sightings: local checklists!

Scythebill's checklist mode for entering sightings, before now, has been just the built-in checklists. Now - for bird taxonomies - Scythebill will take advantage of OpenBirding to fetch more local checklists. In particular, it can load state checklists from around the world, county checklists from the US and the UK, and hotspot checklists too (for hotspots with at least 10 checklists)! The checklists automatically focus on the time of year for your visit, and give you a lot of extra information in the new Highlights column:

You can see some species marked as "Unusual here" - not necessarily rare in the area, but rare at this site. And others "Unusual here now" - unusual here at this particular time of year. And finally "Local rarity", here a White-faced Ibis that is common in parts of California, but rare in this corner of the state. And all of those details get explained in the species information box on the right.

Scythebill's checklist mode is also much faster to load - checklists with over a thousand species like some country lists used to be rather slow to appear.

Even if you don't use checklist mode, Scythebill uses this new data to sort the species entry popup automatically.

A privacy note: if you're concerned about sending locations to OpenBirding, there is a new preference to disable use of OpenBirding APIs. That said, all requests to OpenBirding go through an intermediate server that Scythebill runs, so OpenBirding never sees your IP address (or any other information about you).

Map improvements - maps everywhere!

The maps in "Lifers map" and "Ticks map" now load much faster and (I think) look much better. They also zoom in and out and scroll around much more smoothly.

But also: the old "Range" links which used to take you to a webpage now take you to an inline map. You can expand that map to fill the screen with an expand icon, and for the eBird taxonomy, you can click a little eBird icon to take you to the eBird species map!

These maps aren't just more convenient - they also are more accurate. Instead of treating island groups like the Galapagos, the Azores, or Socotra as part of their countries, they can show you ranges limited to those. They can even show you regions within Indonesia!

 

But wait, there's more! You can get straight to the map just by tapping the "M" key. And: all of this works in the World extended taxonomies too! And: if you look closely at the screen below (for a butterfly), you'll see a little flying dove in the top right - that's iNaturalist. Click that, and it'll take you to an iNaturalist map!

Itinerary planning polish

You can now fetch "best hotspots for all targets" when your target is "everything" - useful for planning a big day or big year, for example, when you're inherently starting at zero. (Before, you'd get an error.)

eBird sensitive species are still unavailable in itinerary planning - but Scythebill now tells you about it ("Western Capercaillie is a sensitive species: no hotspots to suggest."), rather than leaving it to you to figure it out.

If you use the IOC taxonomy, itinerary planning isn't hidden anymore: it does prompt you to switch to eBird/Clements (because it uses eBird data).

Microsoft Store improvements

If you download and run Scythebill from the Microsoft Store, it'll now detect if you have an older version of Scythebill from a standalone installer, and offer to start the uninstaller. (You don't have to say yes, and Windows will ask for permission to modify your system before the uninstaller starts.) This has confused a fair number of users: you need to uninstall the standalone version or Windows may keep finding and running the older version.

Also, Microsoft Store installers now make it so that you can double-click .bsxm files and open them in Scythebill.

Other improvements

• The standalone Windows and Linux installers are a lot smaller - about 60MB instead of almost 300MB!
• "Browse by trips" has a new button you can tap to collapse (or re-expand) the trip details.
• Users occasionally forgot they'd turned on "Only visited locations?" in "Browse by location"; if you search for a location that's hidden by that option, you'll get a hint which can uncheck it for you.
• Some bugs in editing trip details in "Browse by trips" have been resolved.
• There's an arm64 Linux installer, for those who run Linux on that type of CPU (or would like to).
• Scythebill has long "phoned home" once every five days to look for an updated version. That request includes very basic information about Scythebill, like what version you're running, what language you use, and what operating system you run. It now also includes the type of CPU you use, so I can figure out what to support going forward.

Scythebill 20.3: Itinerary planning!

Scythebill 20.3 is out, and the big new feature is something I've been working on quietly for awhile - itinerary planning! There's also a more reliable way to transfer files to Android (or the iOS beta), and lots of smaller improvements and fixes. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

One note, though: this may be the last version of Scythebill that will include the IOC taxonomy. Its last release was in May, and its last "big" release is more than a year old now. It's not going to receive further updates, and I'd rather simplify as eBird and AviList convergence nears completion.

Update: Scythebill 20.3.1 was released on October 12th; it fixes an error when loading some saved itineraries in Excel, along with some smaller fixes.

Update 2: Scythebill 20.3.2 was released on October 13th; it fixes a date parsing bug introduced in 20.3 which broke parsing of dates in eBird checklists, and improved itinerary support for users with "Count heard-only" disabled.

Itinerary planning

Scythebill's got a brand new feature to help you plan your trips - whether you're building a new itinerary for yourself, or want to prepare a list of targets for a set itinerary, this can help you out! It relies heavily on eBird data, especially as prepared by another open-source birding software provider - OpenBirding. My thanks for all their work!

To start, select a country or state in Browse by location or on the Lifers map (in Special Reports) and click the new "Plan itinerary…" button:

You can find the best hotspots to visit for individual species, or even across your entire lists, for any target list. So you can tackle year lists, or ABA or Western Palearctic lists, etc., then add those to an itinerary.

Itinerary stops go into a list in the center, where they can be renamed, reordered, removed, or combined. And the list for each stop isn't just "present" or absent - it's also categorized based on frequency, from "common" and "uncommon" down to "scarce' and "rare".

And if you're wondering when to go, just click "When to go..." at the top and a wealth of additional information emerges:

 ... and even an eBird-style per-species barchart!

Once you've got your itinerary set, save it as a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has both the itinerary and the species list in two tabs. You can reopen it later with Open itinerary... in the File menu. And if you share it with another Scythebill user, they can open it and see how the same itinerary works for their target species!

There's so much here that I've made a demo video.

Some quick points of caution: all of this is based on what other birders have reported to eBird. Sparsely "eBirded" locations will have less accurate data. eBird "Sensitive Species" will not show up in itineraries at all. And the existence of a hotspot doesn't guarantee that the spot is publicly accessible or even safe to visit - you'll need to use your own judgement before visiting a site.

Encrypted cloud transfer for "Send to phone"

The "send to phone" feature for the Android (and iOS beta) app sends your sightings straight across your local network. That fails on networks that keep devices apart, such as many hotel, office and guest Wi-Fi networks. The dialog now has a "Use encrypted cloud transfer" button.  The file will be uploaded to a server Scythebill runs - but only after end-to-end encryption is applied. The "key" for decrypting is in the QR code, and not sent to Scythebill's servers; I cannot read the file contents in any way. It's also deleted immediately after your phone receives it (and in 2 hours if that doesn't work).

Smaller changes

• All requests to eBird, Google, and the new OpenBirding APIs now are routed through an intermediate Scythebill server. This should have no effect on your usage, but means (in particular) that your IP addresses and other information never gets to eBird or Google.
• eBird taxonomy families and orders now have common names in Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Dutch. Some of these names are invented (though derived from proper translations of species), so if I've gotten any wrong, let me know!
• A bug where editing visit details showed stale report information (making it look like data was lost, though it wasn't) has been fixed.
• A few small import fixes have been made - in particular, Scythebill now supports importing with dates containing four-letter month abbreviations like "Sept".
• Species entry was broken for locations with hierarchies of county/state/country in an unexpected order.
• Species entry is more graceful when resized for a tall screen.
• 20.3.2: undescribed species that you've already recorded were sometimes shown as if they'd be lifers when "Count undescribed species" is turned off.

Scythebill for Android - What's nearby?

A new version of the Scythebill Android app is out, and available on the Play Store.

The big new feature in this release is "What's nearby?". It uses eBird and OpenBirding data to answer the question every birder asks: what could I see around here that I haven't seen yet?

Nearby for a single species or a report

Every species page now has a Nearby section with the same two tabs: recent eBird reports of that species near you, and the best hotspots for it this month.

You can also run any report and tap New species nearby in the Query section. Scythebill shows two tabs here too - "Recently seen" and "Best hotspots". But instead of just being recent sightings or hotspots for one species, it's any species that would be new for that list. Taking a non-birding trip, and unexpectedly have a free morning? It just takes one click to see what's nearby and would be a lifer, or a year bird, or a state bird, etc., or to find a good place to go birding with multiple possibilities!

Each entry lets you link to the eBird checklist or hotspot, or you can click the directions icon and open up Maps to show you how to get there.

Plan ahead: search near any place

Nearby can use where you're standing - but you can also choose Search near a place… and type in a town, park, or airport to see what's around your next stop before you get there.

Other changes

• The app is now fully translated into Spanish and German. Dates, times, and month names also follow your phone's language and regional settings.
• There's a number of smaller improvements to layouts, performance, and error handling.

Scythebill 20.2: Scythebill for Android!

Scythebill 20.2 is now available, with better species information popups and other fixes. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Update Sept. 8: 20.2.2 is now out. It fixes the "Send to phone" feature on MacOS, and adds some further performance improvements.

Scythebill for Android!

I've gotten lots of questions over the years whether I'll ever support Scythebill on phones. The answer today is, partly, yes! Scythebill for Android is now available.

This is not a data entry app (at least, not yet). What it helps you with is answering questions in the field like "when was the last time I saw that species?" or "have I photographed it?" or "do I need that for the ABA region?" It gives you a basic version of "Browse by species" and "Show reports", right on your phone, with no need for an internet connection. As always, this is all free, and you don't need to create an account.

Just install the Scythebill app on your phone, then send your .bsxm to your phone. You could copy the .bsxm file manually to your phone (downloading from the cloud, or emailing it to yourself), or you can use the new "Send to phone" feature in Scythebill 20.2. Select "Send to phone..." in the File menu - you'll get a QR code, like below. Then, from the Scythebill Android app, use "Receive from desktop...", scan the QR code, and (after a brief pause) done! (You do need your phone and desktop to be on the same Wi-Fi network.)

(And for iOS users of iPhones and iPads... nothing to announce yet - no promises, but I'm looking into it.)

Better species information

The last release added a new bit of interface that let you bring up species information, everywhere you see a species. The new version makes that much easier to bring up and keep up, and shows you even more information.

Any time you've got an item selected with a circled I icon - ⓘ -, just tap the "I" key, and it'll pop up. Tap I again, and it'll go away. But - even better - you can use the up and down arrow keys, and it'll stay visible! So you can rapidly view species information for a lot of species at once.

But wait, there's more! There's more information now in the species information popup:

The popup shows all groups and subspecies and their ranges, all in one place. And there's a little "copy" icon in the upper-right - click that, and all the content will be copied to the clipboard.

Something else...

There's a small feature which I'll just leave as a surprise. You'll know it when you see it.

Fixes and small improvements

• Some aspects of using Scythebill should be much faster, especially if you've got a large list with many locations.
• The "Type a species name" boxes didn't show a full list of names in some cases when using anything other than Americna English species names.
• Trip reports now have a "Lifers in bold?" option
• Trip reports generally do a better job now when they're generated across multiple trips
• An error message that could appear after merging locations has been fixed
• There's a new "Daily" option for backup frequency. (Scythebill will still only back up if something has changed since the previous backup.)

Scythebill 20.1 - more usability improvements

Scythebill 20.1 is now available, with a bunch of polish on top of the previous release. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Species information everywhere

In previous versions, Scythebill showed you a bunch of info about species - range, alternate names, taxonomic info, and links to eBird and Avibase. But it only showed it in a few places, and often without enough room to see all the information without scrolling.

Now, everywhere Scythebill shows a list of species, when you hover the mouse over one you'll se a small, circled "I". Click on it, and you'll get the full species info. This works in Browse by location, Show reports, Browse by trips, and even the new Ticks map and Lifers map.

Another nice addition: "Enter sightings" still shows the species information in a box in the bottom left of the screen, but if there's more text than fits by default, just move the mouse over it and it automatically expands to show you all the content.

Remembered reports are even more powerful

When you add a "remembered report", it appears on the front page of Scythebill. Now, it also shows up as an option for "Browse by location" and "Browse by trips" whenever it makes sense. For an example, if you've created a "Photographed" remembered report, then when you visit "Browse by location", you can switch to see all species that you might gain for your Photographed list with one click:

You can do the same thing in "Browse by trips", though this is retrospective - you can see what species you added to your "Photographed" list on a trip.

Speaking of "Browse by trips": the old "Highlight lifers?" checkbox is gone, replaced with a far more flexible drop-down just like that in "Browse by location".

Show reports re-styled

The "Show reports" screen has been re-styled to be generally easier-to-read, with the most dramatic improvements for "First records (lifers)". The screen now takes more advantage of font sizes and colors as well.

You might also notice in this screen shot that the Taxonomy chooser has moved to the upper-right of the screen. This lets the species name "Jump to" move up to the upper-left of the screen, saving just a bit of vertical space on the page.

Smaller features

• There's a new preference to choose whether you want AM/PM times or 24 hour times. Scythebill has long followed your location's default, but now you can choose it explicitly.
• The first page of "Enter sightings" now has a small calendar icon - click it to set the date to today.
• When an import finishes, it now tells you what dates and locations were in the import.

Small fixes

• Spanish users could not load the import page.
• German users could not see all of the text on the Preferences page.
• "Browse by location" checklists omitted introduced species altogether if you disabled "Count introduced?"
• Editing trip names or other details now properly enables "Save".
• Upgrading an extended taxonomy now retains the existing order of taxonomies.
• Scythebill CSV imports with potentially ambiguous dates (3/4/2026) now consistently prefer the month/day or day/month ordering for your location. (It already did the right thing if the import had any entries with unambiguous content - 3/25/2026 or 25/4/2026, for example.)
• Some smaller fixes have been made to the new Lifers and Ticks maps

Scythebill 20.0 - a big release!

Scythebill 20.0 is now available. It's got ... a lot!

• The front pages of Scythebill have been redesigned, including...
• The "Remembered reports" feature can now be reordered, and names can be edited
• The "Lifers map" is now a dynamic, in-app map
• There's a new "Ticks map" in "Special reports", also a dynamic, in-app map, supporting states in nearly all countries and even US and UK counties!
• "Manage Taxonomies" can automatically download and install or upgrade world taxonomies in bulk.
• ... and more.

I'll publish posts that give more details about these new features - but today, I'll just talk about the new front page and a few smaller things.

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

Update: Scythebill 20.0.3 was released on July 13th to fix a large performance problem on "Enter sightings".

Update 2: Scythebill 20.0.4 was released on July 15th to fix an error on "Enter sightings" for the first sightings on a new location; it includes some other small changes (noted below).

New front page design

Scythebill's main pages have long been rather plain. I could insist that was an intentional design choice, but that isn't really true - I'd just never put in the time to improve it. I think the new design is a substantial improvement - without going too far:

 

But it's not just a visual change. The "Remembered reports" section at the top is much more flexible. You can drag to reorder items within the list, and when you move the mouse over an entry you'll see a pencil icon - click that, and you can (at long last) edit the name of a remembered report!

And what's more, "Remembered reports" now connects to "New for" messages across Scythebill! Because I've saved "ABA region" above, and ordered it near the top, Scythebill will automatically tell me when a new sighting is new for the ABA region in "Enter sightings" or in the post-import summary, and if I create a checklist spreadsheet for a US state or Canadian province, it'll tell me if a species would be new for my ABA list.

Safer .bsxm file management

A number of users over the years have gotten confused by having multiple .bsxm files. As a reminder: Scythebill saves all of your data in a single .bsxm file. Backups are great, but if you accidentally open a backup .bsxm file and start adding sightings to that backup, your main copy doesn't get the new sightings!

Scythebill now automatically catches these conditions, warns you, and offers to re-open the newest file instead:

But that's not all!  Before, if you renamed or moved your .bsxm file, or had it stored an external drive that wasn't available, Scythebill would dump you at the new user screen without any guidance why it happened. Now, that screen will tell you why you're here and where the .bsxm file had been (and this new user screen is also redesigned)!

  

Easier World Taxonomy management

The Manage Taxonomies page has also been updated. But most importantly, there's a new button at the top - "Download world taxonomies...". But look closely at that screenshot - there's an "Updates available" message! Scythebill now automatically detects when updates are available to the five most-used world taxonomies.

Click that button, and a dialog appears. On my list, it shows that I'm fully up-to-date with Mammals, but I could update Butterflies, Reptiles, and Odonates, and never installed Amphibians.

Click "Download and install", and Scythebill will do the rest!

But it gets better: previously, if an upgrade had some taxonomic issues it couldn't automatically handle, Scythebill would write a .csv file to disk containing everything it couldn't handle, and ask you to remember to use "Import sightings" later. Now, Scythebill will direct you straight to the import flow without any extra files.

And more...

Some of these additions are big enough that I'll talk about them in another blog post, but I like to provide a full list of changes with each release, so:

Special reports

• The lifers map and "total ticks" special reports have been massively overhauled and improved
• "Verify against checklists..." and "Find checklist rarities..." are no longer in the File menu, but are condensed into a new "Checklist status report" that shows inside Scythebill. As a small improvement, it lets you also see species which are marked as a variety of others checklist statuses - Extinct, Endemic, Introduced, and Not established.
• The "Splits and Lumps" report now shows if you lost any species from a split because of an unresolved "sp.".
• 20.0.4: the Splits and Lumps report now gives a graceful message when you switch to a non-bird taxonomy
• 20.0.4: the Ticks Map now always uses the eBird names for states

Preferences

• The Preferences page has been redesigned and separated into multiple tabs
• The Backup page can now - with one click - point your backups at one of several cloud providers (DropBox, Google Drive, Apple's iCloud, and Microsoft's OneDrive)

Other

• The Western Palearctic "magic location" now automatically incorporates latitude and longitude to rule in and out sightings in all the countries where the border does not fall along exact state lines. The boundary in Kazkahstan is still not right - it should follow the Ural river, but currently uses a line of longitude as a poor approximation.
• The Spanish and German translations are massively improved.
• The Scythebill CSV format now correctly preserves manually entered photo names and "starred" favorites.
• Imports which purely pass latitude/longitude now typically resolve not just to country, but also to state and sometimes (in the US and the UK) even county.
• BirdBrain imports were completely failing if any sighting had a non-country location (like deepwater pelagics)
• New users are automatically given a "Download taxonomies" dialog to add any of the 5 world taxonomies.
• 20.0.4: eBird updates to the list of states for Vietnam, Tanzania, the Seychelles, and South Korea have been incorporated
• 20.0.5: an error introduced by the previous update made some .bsxm files with records from South Korea or Vietnam unloadable.

Scythebill 19.4.0: the IOC 15.2 taxonomy and the Windows Store

Scythebill 19.4.0 is now available. It's got the new - and last - IOC 15.2 taxonomy. It's also now available in the Windows Store!

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

Update: Scythebill 19.4.1 was released on May 16. See fixes at the bottom of the page.

Update 2: Scythebill 19.4.2 was released on May 31 with more fixes, and one small feature: when you import a single visit (or trip) - say, a single eBird checklist - there'll be a "Visit sightings..." button on the import results which lets you immediately edit those sightings.

Update 3: Scythebill 19.4.3 was released on June 3rd with one more fix.

IOC 15.2

The IOC taxonomy has released its latest, and last taxonomy. More than anything else, I'd like to thank the prime movers behind the IOC taxonomy - David Donsker, Frank Gill, and Pamela Rasmussen - for all of their excellent work over the years. They've set a very high bar for future taxonomy maintainers!

This last update is largely one of alignment with AviList, and as so it contains more lumps than splits. There are some splits from the SACC (South American Checklist Committee) which I would expect to be mirrored in the AviList and eBird 2026 taxonomies. As always, you can visit the "Split and Lumps" report in Special reports to get a full rundown of how it affected your list:

The obvious question is what I'll be doing with IOC - and AviList! - going forward. My current plan:

• eBird has stated that in 2026 they will be fully aligned with AviList. Therefore, the eBird 2026 taxonomy release will be AviList, so when Scythebill upgrades to that taxonomy (expected in October), it will support AviList.
• I plan to keep IOC 15.2 supported in Scythebill for about one year. By the time the eBird/AviList 2027 taxonomy is released, I plan to remove IOC altogether from Scythebill.

Windows Store

Scythebill can now be installed directly from the Windows Store!  No more dire warning messages from Windows, just a fast and easy install.

The direct downloads will still be supported going forward, for those who prefer that path.

If you've used the old direct downloads and are moving to the Windows Store, you may want to uninstall (the old) Scythebill to prevent having two (potentially incompatible) versions installed.

Other fixes

• A few species were accidentally marked as "Undescribed" (Principe Scops-Owl, Timor Nightjar, and Ampay Tapaculo), which removed them from life list totals.
• Trips which crossed top-level regions - and were therefore "World" trips - no longer block editing the trip name.
• A (harmless) error message when closing the "Edit..." dialog in Browse by location is now fixed.
• Opening a non-.bsxm file as if it were a .bsxm file now gives a clearer error messages
• 19.4.1: Imports from non-eBird software might fail with a NullPointerException.
• 19.4.1: Wildlife Recorder imports support trips that use another trip as a location.
• 19.4.1: BirdLasser "lifelist" exports are now supported 
• 19.4.1: the "Report issues" menu item has been removed (Bitbucket stopped supporting this feature, so the link didn't work)
• 19.4.2: Scythebill lets you load eBird "My Data" exports directly from the .zip file... or did, until it broke in recent versions. It's working again.
• 19.4.2: In some cases, using the "Sp." or "Hybrid" buttons when viewing a single sighting could cause an error when clicking Save.
• 19.4.2: Windows users storing their .bsxm file on OneDrive get a better error message when OneDrive isn't working or is misconfigured.
• 19.4.3: eBird made a slight change to their checklist CSV files, which caused Scythebill to be unable to parse the start times.