You might want to consider a code longer than 4 letters. I suspect any
4 letter code will require many exceptions which has its drawbacks.
I don't know about five letter codes but its easy to come up with a six
letter code with simple rules and only a few exceptions. For example:
1. Birds with one-word names are abbreviated by taking the initial
letters of the name:
LOGRUN Logrunner
MALLEE Malleefowl
EMU Emu
2. For two-word names, take the first two letters and the last letter
of the first word and the first two letters and the last letter of the
second last word. Hyphenated words are always treated as separate words:
LIELOT Little Lorikeet
BUHHEN Bush-hen
ORECHT Orange Chat
3. For three-word names, take the first two letters of each word:
CHBICU Channel-billed Cuckoo
NOGIPE Northern Giant-Petrel
NANIHE Nankeen Night Heron
4. For four-word names, take one letter each from the first three words, then
the first two letters and the last letter of the fourth word.
BBPKIR Buff-breasted Paradise-Kingfisher
CBQTHH Chestnut-breasted Quail-thrush
BBSPEL Black-bellied Storm-Petrel
5. Except for these birds which are abbreviated thus:
BUFQUL Buff-breasted Button-quail
CMGWEL Chiming Wedgebill
WHBWRO White-browed Robin
WHBWWO White-browed Woodswallow
The codes these rules generate can be found in taxonomic and alphabetic
order at:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~andrewt/birdcodes.txt
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~andrewt/sorted_birdcodes.txt
If you want to experiment with codes - try:
http://menura.cse.unsw.edu.au:1080/cgi-bin/birdcode.cgi
It lets you see the clashes a code generates.
John Shipman's discussion of codes for US birds is worth reading:
http://www.nmt.edu/~shipman/z/nom/homepage.html
Andrew Taylor
Birding-Aus is on the Web at
www.shc.melb.catholic.edu.au/home/birding/index.html
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