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.
