How do you organize your sightings?

nczoofan

nczoofan

Well-Known Member
5+ year member
I was wondering how everyone on this forum organizes their animal sightings.Currently I have a giant spreadsheet for each of the following mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and other. I record each time I have seen the species and subspecies if necessary. Yet this is far to bloated after several years and I have been trying to think of innovative ways to fix this.

Do y'all record species lists every time? Or do you just record new species you have never seen before? Either way how do you best store your information?

Sorry for all these questions, I just am looking for ways to adapt my system.
 
I have an Excel sheet where I try to organize my lifelist by Infraclass, Order, Family, and then Species. I list the common name I use and the scientific name in separate boxes as well as the places I've seen the species, the year(s), and the status because I like to keep track of that. This works well for mammals and birds, but for reptiles and amphibians I start at the Order. Fishes I start at Class, and for invertebrates I go Phylum, Class, Order, etc. It's not a perfect system, but it works for me and makes it organized enough.

~Thylo
 
What I do (or at least what I'm trying to do) is to write or record the species when I see it. When I have a chance, I make a spreadsheet per zoo/ sighting location and organize by which precinct/ exhibition and list the species I saw and when. It's pretty flawed but it works.
 
I just record the first sighting and most recent sighting, the location and date. I know I wouldn't read species lists from every zoo visit so I have this stripped-down model that works for me.
 
I had a several Google Docs listing each of my life lists (Mammals, Birds, Reptiles, Amphibians), but unfortunately there was a problem and my Google account was deleted.
 
I have a few methods.

Each year I have a spreadsheet which lists all the birds of Australia on one tab, all the mammals on another, and all the reptiles on a third. There are 365 columns for each day of the year, with total columns so I can see in the header how many different species I have seen that year. And I have a page at the end that is a table listing the totals for the previous years. For the last three years when I was on Christmas Island I had only the birds and fish listed, with a separate page for recording the few mammals and reptiles.

When I go on holidays overseas I create a similar spreadsheet listing the mammals, birds and reptiles of the country/place I'm visiting.

All my bird sightings are also recorded in eBird, and I use this as my primary Life-list reference.

All of these methods are for sightings in the wild only.

And about ten years ago I purchased Birdbase software, and I use that to record all bird and mammals sightings, plus all bird and mammal sightings in zoos where I have photographs. (I tried creating fish and reptile databases but they have somehow become corrupted and are not entirely accurate.)

:p

Hix
 
Both for trips to the wild and for zoo visits, I include the lists of animals seen in each one handwritten in my "natural histori diaries". They're not true diaries, most days are empty and I only write something when I see, find, get, etc. something interesting biodiversity-related. If the species observed is enough interesting by itself, I annotate them even outside of nature trips and zoo visits - for example if I find an insect or bird in my garden or inside my city. If the species is even more interesting that for just annotate it, then I also illustrate it.
This way, I can track most of my biodiversity sightings (both captive and wild) since 2002.
Some examples:
P1230546.jpg P1230550.jpg P1230551.jpg P1230552.jpg P1230553.jpg P1230554.jpg P1230559.jpg P1230560.jpg P1230562.jpg P1230563.jpg
 
I used to use an Excel Spreadsheet like many others. However, I am also a keen birdwatcher and have been using an App on my iPad called Bird Journal for that.
Two years ago, I decided to use this App for zoo animals as well, although at the time it only had Birds of the World as an actual list you could download (including subspecies). I subsequently created my own lists for mammals and amphibians (my particular areas of interest), this took a long time, but meant I could add whichever animals I wanted too.
Every time I visit a collection I tick off the species or subspecies I see. You can also add number of individual animals and genders too, and add species that are not on your lists.
There was no charge originally for this App that I remember. However, you can track your ‘sightings’ in more depth for a fee.
I have recently set up the same app for my son on his android phone, and have found that someone has now added a Mammals of the World List including subspecies, which can be downloaded too.
Worth a look if you like your lists.
 
Interesting thread! Like many others, my main wildlife lifelists are organized in google spreadsheets that I semi-regularly back up to excel files and duplicate spreadsheets. The wildlife file has 4 main tabs: the full life lists in taxonomical order for birds, mammals and herps are the three I use most. In these, I add new species or subspecies I see in the wild when I see them, and for every year I have a separate column in which I write down when I first see (or hear) a species. This way I can easily see how many species I've seen in my life, and how many I've seen every year. In the fourth tab I list all bird species I've seen chronologically to figure out what "number" every species is (for example #500 was Arctic redpoll, coincidentally exactly a year ago today).
Additionally I also use observation.org and its Belgian/Dutch sites to track all of my wildlife sightings, which has a very easy-to-use app to submit observations, and automatically generates life lists, month lists, week lists, day lists, maps of where I've seen species, how often I've seen each species, the amount of each species I've seen, etc. I occasionally export the bird sightings to Scythebill, which does similar things but is an offline system (so the lists don't suddenly disappear if the website would) and can easily transfer lists from one taxonomy to another - I can know my total lists for both IOC and Clements instantly. I will probably import my sightings to eBird sometime sooner rather than later, but I'm not entirely sure how transferring things from a geofencing system to a hotspot system would work - so I haven't yet.

Besides my wildlife lists I also keep a separate spreadsheet for all species I've seen, wild and captive, but I don't keep annual lists for those: those just consist of taxonomically organized lists each of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and the few fish that I bother to list.
 
Every time I go to a zoo or aquarium, I bring a notepad and pencil. On days I can't find/forget my notepad, I use my phone. At each exhibit I visit, I use the information signs to help me identify any animal I see in it. I then write it down on my notepad. I don't write down the names of the animals I don't see. When I go home, I transfer all the names I've written to Google Docs. When I type the name of a new animal (an animal I've never seen previously), I highlight it in yellow. I then transfer them for a final time to my "Zoo & Aquarium Guide" (my species list) on Google Slides and start making more slides for the new animals (the ones I highlighted in yellow). I label the slide with the name of the animal and add a picture of the animal. I add the general information to the slides (scientific name, habitat, diet, etc) later. When I'm done making the slides, I go back to Google Docs, and unhighlight the names. On average, this process can take about a week, as I don't work on this thing non-stop. Usually, every time I visit a zoo or aquarium I've never been to before, I have to add 80-100 new slides. This whole process is very time consuming, but overall, I think its fun!

Soon, I might start taking pictures of information signs instead of writing down the name of the animal, because I've had many cases where the English name of the animal on the sign was not specific enough, so when I go home and search it up on Google, I don't get a specific species, but instead a genus. Most signs have a scientific name, but they are so annoying to write down, so I might just start taking pictures of the sign instead of writing it down. Plus, it saves paper too.
 
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