Saturday, August 26, 2017

Scythebill 13.8 - the 2017 eBird/Clements taxonomy is available!

Scythebill 13.8 is now available!  As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Google+Facebook, or by email.    This version includes the recently released 2017 update to the eBird/Clements taxonomy and a number of bug fixes.  Thank you to all of the users who reported these bugs!  Your help in keeping Scythebill reliable is invaluable.


eBird/Clements 2017 Taxonomy

The 2017 update is now available and supported in Scythebill.  

See eBird's page on the update for an excellent summary of the species level changes, and Cornell's page, with details on all the 11(!!) new families and many species and subspecies changes.  For North American birders, these reflect the recent American Ornithology Society (AOS, formerly AOU) changes.

As always, the update will be largely automatic.  There's some finer details here where subspecies have been moved from Gray-eyed Bulbul into Olive Bulbul, from Fork-tailed Drongo-Cuckoo into Square-tailed Drongo-Cuckoo, and from Indian Scops-Owl into Collared Scops-Owl.  If you have seen these species, you may need to reanalyze your sightings to be sure of what form you've seen.

Bug fixes

Scythebill will now - on Windows - provide you with a warning if you're saving files into a "Program Files" directory and prompt you to move the file to another directory.  Users have done this and, while it sometimes works, it often causes problems.  (Do let me know if Scythebill is now a little too insistent at asking you to move out of this directory.)

Some Scythebill CSV imports with "spuh"s could fail under relatively unusual circumstances (but not so unusual that a user didn't find it!)

As always, Scythebill includes a number of smaller checklist improvements (along with the general updates to all of the checklists to reflect the new taxonomy).