January 27, 2008...7:27 pm
I have my work cut out for me.
I keep lists in every field guide I carry, usually on the inside of the back cover spilling over onto the front if I am fortunate. I have a pocket-sized daily birding dairy that I carry and little bits of paper with birding notes are stuffed in odd corners of the desk. I also make notes on the entries themselves. I am on my 2nd copy of the Birder’s Life List & Diary from Cornell Lab. While this has been working for me for the domestic birds; the international ones are not accounted for anywhere. I have been relying on memory and that has proven less successful of late. My lists are floundering! Horrors, I even noticed that the Turkish birds are jumbled on my domestic list.
Enough! I decided this winter I would sit down with all of these random books and created a master list. I purchased the new edition of Clements. (I had no idea that it was a veritable tome.) I am barely into the Columbiformes. It is a slow go, but I am determined. I want all of these finished before I leave for South America.
How do you keep your lists?
5 Comments
January 28, 2008 at 9:37 pm
I keep mine in an excel file.
January 30, 2008 at 6:45 am
I volunteer to be your birding assistant, as long as I have access to your books!
January 31, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Ya, most of my lists are on scraps of paper here and there, so I’ve begun using Google Docs, similar to excel. My lists are much smaller, however, since I’ve never been really consistent with keeping track of things when I travel.
February 2, 2008 at 4:06 am
I have finished with the US birds, the birds of India and I am working my way through Europe. There are birds that have changed their names, one, I could not even find until I stumbled on it by accident in another book and the Blue Tit in my Birds of Europe does not appear in Clements. How can that be?
It has been a slow go, because I am looking up every single one to savor the memory.
February 16, 2008 at 2:05 pm
I have almost finished with Costa Rica. I discovered that I have written in most of my field guides. Gad. that means I will have to go through them 1 by 1. Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands next.
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