Scythebill 18.2.0 - Browse by trips improvements, privacy preferences, and more

Scythebill 18.2.0 is now available.  It includes a number of new features, most notably improvements to "Browse by trips" and new privacy options in Preferences.

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

Browse by trips improvements

The recently added "Browse by trips" page now has several new options at the top of the screen:

Lots of new features!

For starters, every time you select a trip (or multiple trips), you'll immediately see how many lifers you got on that trip. You can also enable "Highlight lifers?" to clearly show you those lifers.

It's also much easier to find trips - you can enter the name of a trip (in typical choose-your-own-abbreviation Scythebill fashion) in a new field at the upper left, then click "Jump to" to immediately select it.

And once you've picked a trip, you can find a species fast with a separate species name and "Jump to" button - here at the upper right.

Privacy preferences

The preferences page now has three new options:

By default, Scythebill will use Google Maps and eBird hotspot APIs to help compute latitudes and longitudes, or to find locations near latitude/longitude pairs. These requests do not and have never sent any cookies to those APIs, but if you're uncomfortable with those requests being sent to Google and eBird, you can now disable them.

Scythebill also defaults to using Google Maps to display maps around locations, and when you click a site icon next to a location name with latitude/longitude, it'll open a web browser with Google Maps.  If you're uncomfortable with that choice, you can now switch to OpenStreetMap, or disable maps altogether.

Scythebill also now includes a concise privacy policy in its Help menu, outlining what Scythebill does, or rather doesn't do with your data. I don't expect any surprises lurking in the text, but please let me know if you have any concerns whatsoever.

Other improvements

When you enter a location name, Scythebill will now prefer recently and commonly used location names, so Scythebill will give you local patches before some site you visited once in 1995!

You can also now enter "magic" location names, like the ABA region and Western Palearctic, in the "Jump to" option in Browse by location. Entering these will automatically select all the constitutent locations.  So, for example, "ABA region" will select Canada, the (continental) US, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and Hawaii, and give you the combined checklist.

Finally, the disk image files on MacOS now have a more useful appearance, making it clearer and easier to copy Scythebill into your Applications folder:

Bug fixes

• The "Enter sightings" table had a variety of visual oddities that cropped up with the interface refresh in 18.1.0.  It should now look more consistent and readable in both light and dark modes.
• When entering sightings, the Cancel button would not give you any warnings of lost work if you cancelled before you had entered any species. That could be quite annoying if you'd entered a long visit or trip description!  It now warns you much sooner.
• An odd and long-standing bug where a day-less date like "March 2003" was not considered after "February 14 2002" has been fixed.
• The "Jump to" species button in "Show reports" didn't work to jump to subspecies or groups, and now does.
• The AOS North region checklist omitted Cuba and The Bahamas;  this didn't affect your species list for this region, but it meant that (for example) reports would claim there are only 4 species of Tody, not 5.

AviList and Scythebill

This time, the blog takes a break from the usual release announcements to talk about the brand new AviList taxonomy, and how (and when) Scythebill will support it.

What's AviList?

AviList is a unified, global checklist of birds. After nearly seven years of work, it's just been made public. They plan to perform annual updates going forward.

A new checklist itself wouldn't be big news, but eBird, IOC, and BirdLife International; all participated in its development (as did many other notables), and have committed to converging on this single checklist.

When do the other checklists converge?

IOC will go first.  Its last release (15.2) is expected later this year, at which point their prodigious work comes to an end.

eBird comes next, replacing their taxonomy with the AviList taxonomy in October 2026 (though they only promise "near 100% alignment with AviList by its 2026 update" - emphasis added). I assume, but have not seen explicitly stated, that they will actually produce a custom taxonomy on top of AviList, adding groups and undescribed taxa on top of the core.

BirdLife - whose IUCN RedList assessments are included in Scythebill, but not its taxonomy - will take longer, as they need to perform new assessments on many taxa.

So... what about Scythebill?

It's clear that come the eBird update in 2026, Scythebill will be standardized on the AviList taxonomy (or, perhaps, the eBird extension, with groups and undescribed taxa), and will no longer need to support multiple bird taxonomies. (Though eBird's "near 100%" comment gives me pause.) This is great!

But what about now?  There are two issues with adding AviList v2025 as an additional taxonomic option right now:

• First, there are some shortcuts in the Scythebill code which assume two taxonomies (one primary - eBird, and one secondary - IOC).  Adding a third taxonomy means hunting down all potential bugs in this code, just to delete all that code in a year when we're down to one taxonomy.
• Second, AviList doesn't yet have an up-to-date subspecies list: "AviList v2025 started with a baseline list of subspecies from IOC v11.2 (July 2021), and this initial subspecies taxonomy has been largely carried through to AviList v2025". Because Scythebill uses subspecies (and indeed, relies on them for mapping between taxonomies), this is troublesome.
  

The first makes me hesitant to add AviList as a third option, though I'm not yet entirely ruling it out. The second makes it undesirable to replace IOC with AviList.  Because of this, my current plan is not to support AviList v2025.  And since the October 2026 update of eBird will (hopefully) make it silly to have both AviList and eBird, the simplest option is converging at that date.  As always, Scythebill will automatically update your records to that taxonomy when you upgrade.

I recognize this is a long delay, and birders are understandably eager to adopt this unified list.  That said, I believe the IOC 15.2 release will be very close to AviList v2025 at the species level (indeed, even eBird is already 99% aligned!), and I'm hoping that will be good enough for the majority of Scythebill users. If it's very different, I'll reconsider.

I do plan, though, to add the following features in the coming months:

• The Splits and Lumps report will let users see what AviList will change for their list, relative to both eBird and IOC
• All English name changes in AviList will be added as alternate names (ensuring that imports from AviList will be smooth).