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.

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 message.
• 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)

Scythebill 19.3: fast location checklists from eBird

Scythebill 19.3.0 is now available. It's got better integration between eBird regions or hotspots and Scythebill locations, and can take advantage of that to make checklists in a blink.

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

Fast location checklists from eBird

Scythebill can now create checklists for many locations with just three clicks. Once you've selected the location, click "Create checklist...", then select "Use the eBird Species List API?", then "OK".

And done! You'll have a list of every species ever reported to eBird for that location, and you can immediately see all your potential lifers. (The checklist won't have information about how rare each species is for that location - it will inherit rarity from the country information Scythebill already has.)

Scythebill won't update the checklist automatically for you - but you can always delete it and recreate it as needed.

This works both for built-in locations (like states and provinces, or US counties) and for eBird hotspots once you've entered a hotspot ID - see just below.

Quick links to eBird hotspot and region pages

Scythebill has a new field for locations - "hotspot ID":

You could manually enter it, but Scythebill will enter it for you any time you import from eBird "My Data" exports or choose an eBird location while manually entering or editing a location. (It's not automated yet for eBird checklist imports, but I'll add that soon.)

With a hotspot ID, locations get a new "Hotspot page" link that'll take you right to the eBird site, where you can see recent reports, target species, bar charts and such. 

New "Hotspot page" link

If you create locations before going on a trip, this gives you a fast way to look up information about the sites you're visiting.

There's also a "Region page" link for any built-in locations, like countries, states and provinces worldwide, or US counties. (There's no link for continents.)

Bug fixes

• Some Windows users had a problem where file dialogs would immediately trigger an error.
• "Copy-and-paste automagic" checklist creation now handles slash species - previously, it would import something like "Eastern/Western Warbling-Vireo" as just "Western Warbling-Vireo".
• eBird "geolocation" (Search nearby) results could be dropped if they were at exactly the same lat/long as a Google result.
• "Lifer" highlighting in "Show reports" and "Browse by trip" missed some sightings when using the eBird Clements taxonomy for species entered against the IOC taxonomy.
• Intentionally duplicated sightings with the same taxon, location, and date/time could be erased when re-editing with "Edit sightings".

Scythebill 19.2.0: trip filtering and bug fixes

Scythebill 19.2.1 is now available. It's got a new feature for fast filtering the list of trips and a several small bug fixes. (Scythebill 19.2.0 had a bug preventing startup for some users who were updating.)

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

Trip filtering

If you've been birding for awhile, you may have a very long list of trips. Sorting through that list to find the trip you're looking can be annoying. Now, you can filter the trip list in a blink:

Just type a location name, and only trips to that location will be shown. You can enter a region - as seen above, enter "South America" and you'll see all trips within South America. But you can also enter a state or single location - below it's all the trips where I visited Mindo (a site in Ecuador).

In addition to "Only trips to", you can filter by "Notes contains" for those of you who use trip notes.

If you've got other ways you'd like to filter trips, let me know!

Fixed bugs

• OpenStreetMaps maps are working once again.
• iNaturalist imports gave an unhelpful error message when “Geo” and “Taxon Extras” columns weren't all included; it now gives a good one.
• A few (harmless) error messages in various parts of Scythebill have been resolved.
• Changing font sizes didn't correctly update report results until you left and returned to the report.

Scythebill 19.0: eBird 2025 and automatic photos-to-species entry

Scythebill 19.0.0 is now available. It's got the brand new eBird/Clements 2025 taxonomy, and a new way to add a bunch of photos in one step, automatically assigning them to species.

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

Update: Scythebill 19.0.1 was released with a few improvements for the automatic photos-to-species entry feature and smaller changes. 19.0.2 added some further fixes.

Update: Scythebill 19.1.0 was released on December 13 with improvements to importing, especially for non-bird taxonomies, and some small bug fixes.

eBird/Clements 2025 taxonomy

The headline for most users will be the new taxonomy. All the details on that taxonomy are nicely wrapped up on the eBird site in an article which includes a nice summary table. This update gets eBird very close to the AviList taxonomy, though in a handful of cases ahead of it.

As always, Scythebill will handle a large majority of taxonomic changes automatically for you. If you want to know how it affected your list, visit the Spits and Lumps special report:

I was "lucky" to avoid the big lumps in New Guinea and the southern oceans.

Update: Scythebill 19.0.1 added links to Avibase for all eBird species, groups, and subspecies.

Automatic photos-to-species entry

This one might be big for the photographers out there!

If you've entered a lot of sightings with photographs in the past, you've had to drag each photo, one-by-one, to the correct species. This was tedious and error-prone. But if you've labeled photos with species names already in Lightroom, ON1 Photo RAW, or any other image editor, you can now handle that all in one step. A video will explain better than words:

Just drop the photos on the new region at the bottom-right of the species entry page, and all the photos will be examined and automatically assigned to species, adding species if necessary. You can drop hundreds of photos in one step.

This isn't using Merlin or any AI to identify the photos. Scythebill just looks at the file name and the text of any description you added (EXIF or IPTC tags, for those who know these things), and sees if it can find species names. (If you don't do that work already in your photo editor, then this won't save you time.)

Any time Scythebill can't find a species name, it'll leave a photo behind in the drop box. You can manually drag it onto the correct species, or leave it unassigned and have it added to the visit or trip.

Visit photos

Scythebill has supported attaching photos to individual sightings, and attaching links to trips. Now, you can add photos to a visit. If you took photos of the crowd at a giant twitch, or habitat shots, or anything else you'd like to remember, you can add those.

Bug fixes

• Fixed in 19.0.2: The "Edit sightings..." button in visit info was incorrectly disabled in many cases.
• Fixed in 19.1.0: Trip data in the Scythebill format was improperly imported - locations were dropped.
• Fixed in 19.1.0: Chinese and Japanese characters were displayed as boxes on Windows.
• Improved in 19.1.0: Scythebill is now much more careful when importing to avoid seemingly good name matches for clearly erroneous locations. For example, a "Wood Frog" recorded from Australia is not Wood Frog (Lithobates sylvaticus) but rather the Australian Wood Frog (Papurana daemeli).

Scythebill 18.4.2 - easy location merging, family lifer maps, and bug fixes

Scythebill 18.4.2 is now available. I'm mostly releasing it now to get out some bug fixes, but it also has some new features - location merging is much easier, and there's a new "World family lifers map" in Special reports. 

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

Update: Scythebill 18.4.3 was released on October 6, with a few important fixes to location editing. It also adds some new options for sighting notes reports, described below.

Update 2: Scythebill 18.4.4 was released on October 13.  It should fix trip report generation on Windows, and also includes the latest IUCN Redlist updates.

Easy location merging

Scythebill has a rule that any one "parent" location can't have duplicate names among its immediate "children" locations. This meant that if you were reorganizing your locations in Browse by location, you might have seen this annoying dialog, asking you to go read the manual to find a multi-step process:

Now, you'll see this dialog:

Just click "OK" and the two locations are merged. It works whether you're dragging-and-dropping, or editing the name directly, or using the "Edit..." dialog. It'll even merge multiple locations all at once if you drag multiple locations onto a new parent.

World family lifers map

If you're interested in seeing all the families of birds in the world (or all the families of mammals, or any other world taxonomy supported by Scythebill), you can now get a fast overview of what countries to visit. Just select Special reports, then click on World family lifers map. Here's what it looks like for a new user without any sightings (so, effectively, showing you how many families of birds each country has in total):

Not a world-changing feature, I'll be the first to admit, but it shows some fun facts. Indonesia has the most families of birds anywhere - 125. And what country in the Americas has the most families? Not Colombia or Brazil, which are incredibly species-rich; it's Mexico, with 96!

New options for "Sighting notes" report options (18.4.3)

If you use eBird, you may have run into the issue that it doesn't have any way to indicate that a bird was heard-only.  Many users have adopted one convention or another in the sighting notes - like using "H" or "(H)" or "Heard" - to indicate heard-only species. You can now use "Sighting notes" queries to find these more easily - and then use "Bulk edit..." to set heard-only in Scythebill. There's four new options - two each standard and case-sensitive - for "is exactly" and "starts with word".  "Is exactly" does what it says - you could use it to find everything where the notes are exactly the letter "H". While "Starts with word" lets you find notes that start with "H" - but only as a word, not just a letter. So "H - a long way off" would match, but "Happy discovery" would not.

Bug fixes

There's a number of bug fixes - almost all of which were reported by users to whom I am exceedingly grateful.

• The Western Palearctic region only included the Asian portion of Egypt.
• Deleting a location used for a Trip could result in a broken .bsxm file!
• Generating a checklist spreadsheet for a non-bird taxonomy and multiple Australian states could fail.
• The "first anywhere" and "most recent anywhere" sighting options for checklist spreadsheets failed if you selected multiple locations.
• Some features of Scythebill rely on opening web pages in browsers (especially clicking on map links); these weren't working for some Linux users, and (hopefully) will now.
• 18.4.3: editing a location name immediately after a merge could cause corrupted locations.
• 18.4.3: using the Edit... dialog to edit a location type (but leaving the name constant) could cause corrupted locations.

Scythebill 18.4.1 - mostly bug fixes

Scythebill 18.4.1 is now available. It's mostly out now to fix some import problems for BirdTrack, Faune-France, and Observation.org, but also includes one new feature as well.

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

Import improvements

BirdTrack imports were completely broken. I think this only started in version 18.4.0, but they should be working once again.

Also: Faune-France imports - part of the Ornitho family - were importing all locations inside Germany. That's now resolved, and as a bonus, those imports should automatically put sightings in the correct French régions and départements!

Finally, Observation.org imports should now be much better about picking the correct country in (literal) borderline cases - sites near the border between two countries. In general, Scythebill can now recognize country names in German, French, and Dutch.

Easier location editing

In Browse by location, the Edit... button let you change the name of a location, or pick a latitude and longitude, but not much more. Now you can use that editor to change the parent location, or add more detail (like putting a location inside a city).

World lifers map - for families (but it doesn't work)

The Special Reports screen has a new button - "World family lifers map". Unfortunately, I realized after I'd released 18.4.1 that the logic is quite broken, and the numbers are wrong. I'll have that fixed for the next release!

Scythebill 18.4.0: "First records" and trip improvements

Scythebill 18.4.0 is now available.  It includes a much-enhanced "First records" query option, some improvements to trips browsing and trips reports, and some smaller features and bug fixes.

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

"First records" improvements

In previous versions of Scythebill, the "First records" query option let you get a list of world lifers, or lifers for a location or region. So if you wanted to know everything new for your ABA list on a trip to Texas, that was easy.

But if you kept other lists - like a "Photographed" list - there was no way in Scythebill to find what was new for that list. Now, it's easy!

When you choose "First records", instead of just a field to choose a location (or leave it blank for your world list), you can choose any report options just within "First records".  So if you wanted to find out what's new for your Photographed list on a trip to Taiwan, choose a report for Taiwan, and then "First records".  For "First records", choose "Photographed" and "yes".

Expanded "First records" options

There's one other meaningful improvement here.  If you use "First records" should be "highlighted", Scythebill has long shown a species list with lifers in bold. Now, when you look at the sightings for a species, the relevant sighting will also be highlighted. So if you were generating that "new for your photographed" list, and you saw a bird multiple times but only photographed it once, that sighting will be in bold:

The first-photographed sighting of White-rumped Munia is highlighted

Trip browsing and report improvements

Trip browsing now automatically shows endemic species - both the count of endemics present as well as those seen:

A successful trip to Taiwan!

Those endemics will also be visible when you generate a trip report.

There's also a new option for generating trip reports - "Show threatened status?" - which can include the IUCN Red List status of species (everything worse-off than Near Threatened).

Smaller features and bug fixes

eBird exports will now automatically combine imported location names below the city/town level. So if you've entered sightings for "The Ramble" inside "Central Park" in New York City, Scythebill will create eBird exports with "Central Park--The Ramble" instead of just "The Ramble".  This will, in particular, help users who import from observation.org and export to ebird.org.

Scythebill-format imports will, if you have multiple latitude/longitudes for a single location, automatically save a lat/long pair inside each sighting description.

The "centralis" subspecies of African Grey Woodpecker in the IOC taxonomy was incorrectly mapped to the "centralis" subspecies of Cardinal Woodpecker in eBird/Clements.  This is fixed, and I've attempted to automatically clean up sightings. If you've seen African Grey Woodpecker in Tanzania, though, I can't detect whether data is correct, and you may have a mis-entered species.

A bug that garbled the display for some Windows users after opening a menu has been fixed.