Hi everyone
I also keep bird charts for my local area (Concord West, Sydney, NSW,
Australia) but I keep them on a daily basis. They are
paper-based out of Excel, with small (but large enough) boxes to record
numbers, plus behaviour info. Where the weather is
rather different I record this also.
These records became a key piece of evidence in my successful fight against a
proposed mangrove boardwalk through Brays Bay,
Concord West a few years ago (I posted an email on this at the time). Such
record keeping can be for more than personal
interest purposes - they can be vital in conservation efforts on a local basis.
The paper-based sheets included a list of the most common birds for Concord
West area, so it was easy to enter data against
them, with a few spare rows down the bottom for any birds not on the list. The
sheets took about 6 A4 pages per month, hence
72 sheets of paper per annum. This year to save trees I decided to merely use
a diary - this means I have to rewrite the
names of the birds each day that I see them, but for most of them I use their
initials as acronyms so it's not too tedious.
I have the acronyms listed on a small sheet of paper so there's no confusion.
At the moment I am converting all my bird records to a database in Access 2000.
I find Access excellent software for
entering data, doing queries and producing reports. I am probably 75% of the
way through conversion and am up to over 16,000
records, as I am a born record keeper and have kept records since I started
"officially" birdwatching in 1988.
The conversion will include entering my local area bird charts so that the
database is the complete picture of my bird
records.
The flexibility of an Access database is so great, that I have also created
tables - in the same database - to input my
orchid finds (I love Australian native orchids).
Irene Denton
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