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Scythebill Changelog

What's new in Scythebill 16.3.0

Mar 5, 2024
  • Editing existing sightings:
  • Entering new sightings is easy, but getting back to the "Edit sightings" screen - to edit all the sightings from that visit - has always been a lot more difficult than it should be. There was one way, buried deep in "Browse by location", but it was hard to find.
  • Now, it's easy: any time you select a sighting, whether in "Browse by species", "Browse by location", or even "Show reports", you'll see a new Visit sightings... button. Click that, and you'll be taken to the "Edit sightings" screen with a list of all the sightings from that same visit.
  • Location checklist spreadsheet improvements:
  • When you save a location checklist as a spreadsheet, there's two new options:
  • First, you can turn off including family names, which can make your spreadsheet much shorter.
  • Second, you can add a column for whether a species is a lifer. Previously, the only option was marking the species name in bold, which was hard on those of you who like to write spreadsheet formulas.
  • BirdLasser import improvements:
  • Scythebill now supports BirdLasser users who use scientific names as something other than the "Tertiary" name.
  • Scythebill also had a bug that could lead to some species being dropped from BirdLasser imports. This would only happen in cases where the "ISO Date" column - which has date/time down to the millisecond! - had multiple species with the exact same value.
  • Small fixes:
  • In some very odd cases, US states whose two-letter abbreviation matches a country's two-letter abbreviation might display as that country. (For example, Pennsylvania would appear as Panama!)
  • State/province lists are updated for a few countries, to match updated eBird treatment. The only really significant changes were for France, which changed from 22 regions to 13. (Scythebill will automatically rearrange your records to match.)

New in Scythebill 16.2.0 (Jan 15, 2024)

  • New for "Photographed":
  • When entering sightings, if a species was photographed for the first time ever in your list, Scythebill will tell you that in the "New for" column. This is really handy for those of you who care about your list of photographed species.
  • Hybrids and sp's of eBird groups or IOC subspecies:
  • I got pretty annoyed with myself recently when I had an intergrade "Red-shafted"/"Yellow-shafted" Northern Flicker in my backyard - and no way to enter it! Scythebill now lets you create a sp. or hybrid of these eBird groups or IOC subspecies.
  • New spreadsheet option - "Omit sp./hybrid sightings?":
  • When you save a report as a spreadsheet, you now have a new "Omit sp./hybrid sightings?" option. This will automatically remove any Sp. or hybrid sightings. This option is particularly useful if you output a spreadsheet sorted by date, which is great for seeing what your 100th species for your patch or 1000th bird for your life list, without having the numbering confused by sp's and hybrids.
  • Fast access to location maps:
  • You can now click the place-marker icon which shows up for any location with latitude and longitude coordinates, and it'll take you right to Google Maps. Even better, that icon now shows up in any sighting editing part of Scythebill. (Let me know if it'd be helpful to add support for other map providers, like OpenStreetMap, Bing, etc.)
  • Better Wildlife Recorder imports:
  • Wildlife Recorder imports are now much improved. In particular, if you export a second CSV file with locations, you'll have vastly less work to do on imports. Also, Scythebill no longer assumes you're using UK-formatted dates
  • Other fixes:
  • Some MacOS users with Sonoma (not me!) had reported problems with Save dialogs not showing up when they tried to save reports or country checklists as spreadsheets. I've made a tweak which might help, though I'll admit the underlying problem is still opaque to me.
  • The "Total Ticks" report had problems handling mutli-continent countries, like the US, Indonesia, and Russia.
  • A very long-standing bug with an error message "IndexOutOfBoundsException: bitIndex < 0" is hopefully fixed.

New in Scythebill 16.1.0 (Dec 24, 2023)

  • IOC 14.1 taxonomy:
  • The IOC 14.1 taxonomy was finalized today, and Scythebill's ready today. You can get an overview of the changes on the IOC website, as well as a full list of splits and lumps. There's a 3-way split of Intermediate Egret, 4-way splits of Hooded Pitta, Fire-breasted Flowerpecker, and Black-throated Trogon, and an 8-way split of Olive-backed Sunbird! As always, if you want to see what it did for your list, visit the Splits and Lumps special report, and you'll see a rundown of just what happened with your life list (I'm up net 10 species).
  • Other changes:
  • There's not a huge number of other changes, just a couple of fixes:
  • When searching for latitude and longitude from a location name (especially towns and cities), you'll get results far more often from Google than before.
  • Extended taxonomies which don't contain checklists would act as if they supported (empty) checklists, giving users lots of "New for checklist" notices.

New in Scythebill 16.0.0 (Nov 9, 2023)

  • eBird/Scythebill 2023 taxonomy:
  • This is a big update - more than 90 splits, many of them multi-way, with several four-way splits, a 5-way split of Hooded Pitta, a 6-way split of Rufous Fantail, and an 8-way split of Olive-backed Sunbird! You can see the full list of changes on the eBird site, but if you want to see what it did for your list, head over to the Splits and Lumps special report, and you'll see a rundown of just what happened with your life list (I'm up net 27 species).
  • Better world taxonomies with checklists:
  • There's new massive Reptiles of the World, Amphibians of the World, and Odonates (Dragonflies and Dameselflies) of the World taxonomies. And the Butterflies of the World and Mammal Watching world taxonomy got updated not long ago as well!
  • You may have thought Scythebill already had these - and it did. But now, virtually every species comes with a range statement and per-country checklists (plus US, Canada, and Australia state/province/territory checklists). It took a lot of work to get range statements for all of those taxa. But now that they're available, you can see (for instance), 175 species of dragonflies and damselflies found on Madagascar (138 of them endemic!), or more than 200 species of snakes in Australia! I've pulled this information from iNaturalist, but, to be clear, it didn't have this information when I got started, so I've dug up the information and contributed range information for somewhere around 10,000 species across the various taxonomies. And for every one of them, you're one click away from the iNaturalist account for the species, often with a wealth of information (a new feature in 15.9.0).
  • "Verify against checklists" for extended taxonomies:
  • If you're using an extended taxonomy with checklists (today, the Mammals, Butterflies, Reptiles, Amphibians, and Odonates of the world), you can use the Verify against checklists... option in the File menu. It'll tell you any species you've recorded that the checklists say shouldn't be there. It's possible that the checklists have errors, and if so, please consider submitting a correction to iNaturalist - but when I tried this on my own mammal list, I uncovered a lot of mistakes in my own records. For example, that "White-fronted Capuchin" I saw in northern Peru wasn't that widespread species at all, but rather the critically endangered Ecuadorian White-fronted Capuchin!
  • Browse by species: "Only species found in":
  • The Browse by species window now has a new option any time you're using a taxonomy with checklists, like the built-in bird taxonomies or any of the new world taxonomies. You can enter a country, a continent, or even a "magic" region name like Western Palearctic or ABA Region, and the taxonomy will automatically filter itself down to orders, families, and species found in that area.
  • This is especially handy for making the new world extended taxonomies manageable. So if you want to use "Browse by species" for exploring a taxonomy, but just for one country, you can do it.
  • Smaller fixes:
  • Entering sightings using a checklist could sometimes display information like a species count on the wrong row. (It was a display-only problem - the data was saved on the right species.)
  • When building a new extended taxonomy, Scythebill was very picky about having each order, family, and genus appearing consecutively in the CSV file. (That is, you couldn't have a block of species in family Someidae, then Otheridae, and then go back to more species in Someidae.) It's now much more flexible.
  • The Splits and Lumps report confused just about everyone with how it reported changes. Now, instead of telling you it's showing splits for "2022", it'll say "2022 vs. 2023".
  • The "English (BOU)" name option for IOC showed "Yellow Warbler" for the wrong species (Setophaga petechia instead of Setophaga aestiva). A few other BOU names have been added for that option, e.g. Daurian and Turkestan Shirike.

New in Scythebill 15.9.0 (Jul 24, 2023)

  • IOC 13.2 taxonomy:
  • IOC 13.2 is just released, and is already supported by Scythebill. It's got 42 splits and 21 lumps - to see which affect you, visit the Splits and lumps special report. (This report shows what has changed from one older taxonomy to today's taxonomy - so for just the changes in 13.2, you want to look at what's changed since 13.1)
  • Butterflies of the World taxonomy:
  • There is also a brand new Butterflies of the World taxonomy! It's a separate download, but it does take advantage of some newly added features (see below). And you may have missed it, but there's also Reptiles of the World and Odonates of the World released back in March, and there's also new updates for both of these taxonomies today.
  • This taxonomy comes from iNaturalist data (also true of the Reptiles and Odonates of the World taxonomies). That data is pretty good, but not as mature as the data for birds - both in taxonomy and in checklists, birds are in way better shape. If you find issues with these taxonomies, and you have access to quality, modern data, you can visit the iNaturalist site and make adjustments.
  • If it's a problem with the underlying taxonomy, you can add a "flag" to a taxon to get a curator to look at it. If it's a problem with the checklists, you can add species to a country's checklist directly. But, in any case, please only do so if you have some expertise or access to up-to-date resources. (For example, "I've got a 2001 field guide" might not be a good enough resource by itself, as taxonomy in these areas changes quite a lot.)
  • Species account links:
  • In both the eBird/Clements and the Butterflies, Odonates, and Reptiles of the World taxonomies, when you select a species in "Browse by species" and other parts of Scythebill, you'll see a new link - "eBird page" or "iNaturalist page". These links will open up a browser on the associated pages, letting you quickly learn more about each species.
  • Range and lifer maps for extended taxonomies:
  • For "extended taxonomies" which include checklists - like the new Butterflies of the World checklist, or many of the other recently released world taxonomies - you can now click Range links and get a world map. You can also use the "World lifers map" to see where you might have the most possible targets.
  • Fixing photo directories in bulk:
  • Previously, if you moved photos from one directory to another, you'd have to click each one to point Scythebill at the new location. This was tedious, to say the least!
  • Now, if you fix one photo, Scythebill will see if it can find an analogous change to apply to the rest of your photos to fix them all at once.
  • Other changes:
  • There's two new sighting statuses: "Better view desired" and "Unsatisfactory views". "Better view desired" is always countable, "Unsatisfactory views" is not. It is entirely your choice which of these statuses you want to use (or if you want to use them at all!)

New in Scythebill 15.8.0 (Jan 29, 2023)

  • IOC 13.1:
  • IOC 13.1 is just released, and is already supported by Scythebill. It's got 43 splits and 12 lumps - to see which affect you, visit the Splits and lumps special report. (This report shows what has changed from one older taxonomy to today's taxonomy - so for just the splits here, you want to look at what's changed since 12.2)
  • Import improvements:
  • BirdLasser imports should be working again - the column header names changed.
  • eBird checklist imports will now automatically try to fetch the county for your sighting. It can only do so for hotspots, not private locations.
  • eBird imports to Scythebill will automatically drop entries like "gull sp." (not supported by Scythebill), and tell you how many such entries were dropped. Scythebill also lets you automatically trim "My Data" eBird imports to just new dates. These two features did not play well together! They do now.
  • Data entry improvements:
  • After entering a species, earlier versions of Scythebill would let you change a single-species sighting to a "sp." or a hybrid, and let you change "sp." sightings back to single species. You can now make any change among these options - hybrid back to single species, "sp." to hybrid, and hybrid to sp.
  • Browse by location now supports a Remove sighting... button. (This is actually a bug fix, not a new feature - this button accidentally disappeared a couple of years ago.)
  • Total ticks improvements:
  • The total ticks report is now much less spartan. Instead of just presenting you with a total number and putting all the details in the spreadsheet, you now get a sorted list of all the locations and their totals, and you can browse species lists (and even edit!).
  • Extended taxonomy improvements:
  • Extended taxonomies added support for per-country checklists in 15.5.0. This has been enhanced to support per-country status (introduced, escapee, rarity, and extinct). There aren't yet any taxonomies that take advantage of this feature, but I needed to support it in Scythebill first!
  • Extended taxonomy country checklists also now support Indonesia and Russia.
  • Other improvements:
  • The "Reconcile sp.'s automatically..." menu item now lets you - optionally - take advantage of rarity information. For example, a Whimbrel (in the eBird taxonomy) that you saw in California could be a Eurasian Whimbrel (in the IOC taxonomy), but that'd be a rarity. It's much more likely that it was a Hudsonian Whimbrel.
  • Scythebill's a bit better at handling backups to Cloud storage - in particular, re-trying automatically (and quietly) when your Cloud storage isn't available at the moment.
  • The World Lifers map now honors your countability preferences (so, for instance, if you don't count introduced birds, it won't include those in its count of possible lifers).
  • I've added Greek, Ecuadorian and Peruvian Spanish, Albanian, Armenian, Persian, and Marathi as eBird/Clements international names.
  • Sri Lanka, Oman, and Russia have updated lists of "states".
  • The second IUCN 2022 Redlist updates have been incorporated.
  • The Big Day special report summary should now look better on Linux.
  • As always, a variety of first country and state records are included in the checklists.

New in Scythebill 15.7.5 (Oct 31, 2022)

  • eBird/Clements 2022:
  • The 2022 update of the eBird/Clements taxonomy is finally here, and it's a big one, with 118 new species from splits (and 41 lumps). If you're a North American birder, this introduces just the Chihuahuan Meadowlark. But if you've spent much time birding in the neotropics or southeast Asia, there's a good chance you'll have a lot of armchair ticks awaiting you.
  • As always, Scythebill will automatically handle the upgrade as much as possible, and use its checklists to automate splits where possible. When you're done with the upgrade, visit the Splits and Lumps "special report" to see what's changed since 2021. (For me, I had a whopping 31 gained against just 2 lost.)
  • There's also been some species where subspecies have been rearranged - moved from one species to another - which may give you some work even if there isn't truly a split. This year, examples include:
  • Golden-bellied and Golden-crowned Flycatchers
  • Black-throated and Green-breasted Mango
  • Sulawesi and Moluccan Scops-Owl
  • Tropical and Large Scrubwren
  • Other changes:
  • Other changes in this are fairly minor:
  • I've added over 1300 alternate scientific names to both taxonomies, mostly reflecting changes in genera over the years. This will help users with imports that only include scientific names.
  • Scythebill should give a better message to Windows users whose file permissions prevent Scythebill from being able to save.

New in Scythebill 15.7.4 (Aug 10, 2022)

  • IOC 12.2 taxonomy:
  • The IOC 12.2 taxonomy is just released. It's a comparatively small update in terms of the total number of splits, but it does include the latest AOS changes (like Chihuahuan Meadowlark). You can see the full list of splits and lumps on the IOC site, or you can visit the "Splits and Lumps" report after installing to see what changed with your list.
  • Other changes:
  • Other changes in this release are relatively minor - it's been just six weeks since the last release. But a few other changes are included:
  • I've done a full round of comparison between Scythebill's checklists and eBird, resulting in many checklist additions.
  • IUCN Redlist updates from 2021 and 2022 are now included.
  • A rare exception when editing subspecies from within "Show reports" is fixed.

New in Scythebill 15.7.0 (Jun 14, 2022)

  • Java upgrade:
  • Scythebill runs on top of the Java platform. You don't have to know that - it packages Java internally, so you don't need to install Java. But it's been awhile since I've updated that internally packaged version, and I've jumped from Java 10 to Java 17. What does this mean to most of you? Nothing! But - it does make me a bit more worried about compatibility problems and odd bugs than I am with most releases. Please do let me know if you see anything going wrong - especially if you're running an older operating system.
  • Lat/long improvements:
  • Scythebill is better at loading latitude and longitude for locations from Google's APIs.
  • Show reports now lets you generate reports within a number of miles or kilometers of another location. A word of caution: this only supports locations with latitude and longitude, and assumes that all sightings at that location have exactly that latitude and longitude.
  • To make this a bit easier, in Browse by location, Scythebill now shows a small green place-marker next to locations that have a latitude and longitude, to make it easier to find locations that should have one but don't.
  • Smaller fixes:
  • Scythebill doesn't support eBird taxa like "Gull sp.", and drops those on import. It now tells you that it's done so.
  • The IOC checklist substituted "South American" for the abbreviation "SA" more often than it should. Specifically, SA often meant South Australia; that mistaken substitution is now fixed.
  • BirdBrain imports that referenced state codes ("AZ" instead of Arizona) are now much better supported.
  • Renaming a location that had an attached custom checklist would inadvertently delete the checklist!
  • An error noticed by a few users after hitting the "Back" button from the "New Location" page during "Enter sightings" has been fixed.

New in Scythebill 15.6.0 (Jan 20, 2022)

  • IOC 12.1:
  • The IOC 12.1 taxonomy was just released. It's a comparatively small one as far as splits and lumps go, with the majority in Asia and Australasia. See that list of changes on the IOC site.
  • This new taxonomy does include, for the first time, bird name translations in Serbian and Turkish; you can try these out from the Preferences page.
  • Other changes:
  • Scythebill now offers a "Restrained" sighting status - for birds you see in-hand, or in a mistnet, or similar circumstances. In North America, the American Birding Association's recording rules require that birds be unrestrained, and by default these sightings will not be considered "countable". But you can go to the Preferences page and make them countable if you wish.
  • If you mistyped a year, you might accidentally enter a checklist from the distant past or far future (the years "202" or "2202"). Scythebill will now warn you before proceeding when you enter these years on Enter Sightings.
  • The "Big day/year" report now properly supports "First sighting" reports. So you can go, year by year, and see which year (or even day) you had the most lifers.

New in Scythebill 15.5.0 (Dec 27, 2021)

  • Scythebill 15.5 is now available with country checklists for extended taxonomies, improvements to reporting, sighting entry, and importing, and more . As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.
  • Extended Taxonomy Checklists:
  • It's now possible to create an "extended" taxonomy - mammals, etc. - that comes with built-in checklists. And taking advantage of this, thanks to Jon Hall at mammalwatching.com, there's a new version of the mammals of the world taxonomy with country checklists!
  • That means that you can see checklists in Browse by location (including endemics), use checklists to enter sightings, and that species dropdown lists prioritize species possible in the location you're visiting.
  • The manual will be updated shortly to explain how this works (if you want to create your own taxonomies), but in the meantime enjoy the new mammal taxonomy.
  • Reporting features:
  • "Never all" reports:
  • Show reports... has a new "Never all" reporting option (alongside "And", "Or", and "Never"). The old "Never" option let you look for (say) species that you have seen in Oregon but never seen in California - you'd combine:
  • "Or" "Location in Oregon"
  • "Never", "Location in Calfornia"
  • But when you had multiple "never" things you wanted to enter, it got more complicated. For a specific example, if you wanted to find out all the birds that you've ever seen in California, but you haven't seen this year in California (because, for example, you're doing a big year), then you might try:
  • "Or" "Location in California"
  • "Never", "Location in Calfornia"
  • "Never", "Date is this year"
  • But this would give you no sightings ever - because it'll exclude any species that were ever seen in Calfornia (in any year), and any species that you've seen this year (in any location)! The new "Never all" option lets you choose something different:
  • "Or" "Location in California"
  • "Never all", "Location in Calfornia"
  • "Never all", "Date is this year"
  • This gives you exactly what you want - it only excludes species that were seen in California during this year.
  • Year Comparison seasonal reports:
  • The Year comparisons report - tucked away under "Special reports" - lets you see, overall and year-by-year, species lists with first arrivals and last departures. Those arrivals and departure dates can be very interesting for migrants.
  • But a first arrival of January 1 and departure date of December 31st isn't particular interesting for a northern hemisphere overwinterer (or a southern hemisphere breeder). And April 20 to October 15 doesn't tell you when a passage migrant might stop appearing in the northern spring/southern fall, or start coming back in the northern fall/southern spring!
  • Year comparisons now offer a "Split years in two?" option, which divides the year into two halves and reports separately on them. So now I can easily see that for the local migrating Black-headed Grosbeaks, in my home town, I've seen them between April 17 and June 13 in the spring, and August 14 to September 26 in the fall. While Hermit Thrushes (which overwinter here), have shown up as early as September 18, and left by April 30. If you've got a lot of your own personal data saved in Scythebill, see what insights you can get into your local birds!
  • "Date is not during":
  • Date reports now include a new "is not during" option, which makes it simple to produce reports that exclude a single year or month.
  • Sighting entry improvements:
  • When revisiting Enter sightings, the previous location as well as date will be saved, making it easier to enter multiple sightings for the same location on different days.
  • It's now possible to enter three-way "spuhs" - very useful for some particularly thorny identification problems (like Zino's/Fea's/Soft-plumaged Petrel).
  • Previous versions of Scythebill showed "Not on the checklist!" warnings whenever you entered "spuhs", hybrids, or domestic-form birds. These false warnings no longer appear.
  • Importing improvements:
  • eBird checklist improvements will now automatically identify the country and state of the checklist, meaning that they can usually be imported without any manual effort to pick a location.
  • eBird likes to have location names like "Golden Gate Park--North Lake", where a larger location (like Golden Gate Park) has many birding hotspots (like North Lake). This is an annoyance if you like to group locations together to get better reporting. Now, if you create a parent location like "Golden Gate Park", Scythebill will automatically slot those eBird locations inside the parent location (as long it's named exactly right).
  • Scythebill also will automatically abbreviate these names, so instead of getting "Golden Gate Park, Golden Gate Park--North Lake", as you did before, you'll get a simple "Golden Gate Park, North Lake".
  • In BirdBrain, Scythebill now supports imports that use dash-delimited dates (12-23-2021) instead of slash-delimited dates (12/23/2021).
  • Imports would sometimes create new but unused locations. This happened if you cancelled an import partway, or if you did a big bulk import of "MyEBirdData" and dropped duplicates. It won't do this anymore.
  • Private locations:
  • If you have locations that you do not want uploaded to eBird, BirdTrack, or iNaturalist, like your home or another private birding patch, you can now make it private. Just select the "Private location?" checkbox whenever you're creating a location, or visit Browse by location, find the location, and click Edit... to get the option to make an existing location private.
  • Other changes:
  • You can now click the "Backup now" button multiple times in a single day, and each will produce a new backup file with a numbered suffix.
  • An error has been fixed that could appear while creating or editing locations in Browse by locations when "Only visited locations?" is selected.
  • It's now possible to disable multiple observers altogether from the Preferences screen; if you enabled this feature but don't actually use it, just click "Disable multiple observers".
  • Some other subtle problems with the multiple observers feature have been fixed.
  • Scythebill includes updated IOC multilingual names, with major changes to Portuguese, Swedish, and Dutch names.
  • As always, many checklist improvements were made, especially an overhaul of the Bangladesh list thanks to the checklist from Chowdhury and Thompson.

New in Scythebill 15.4.0 (Aug 30, 2021)

  • Scythebill 15.4 is now available with the eBird/Clements 2021 taxonomy. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.
  • eBird/Clements 2021:
  • It's been two years since eBird has been able to update their taxonomy, and accordingly - this is is a big one! There's 70 different splits from around the world (and 8 lumps), and one of those 70 is a whopping 13-way split of Rufous Antpitta! There's even 11 species new to science!
  • As always, Scythebill works hard to make this as easy a process as possible, using updated country checklists to simplify the choices as much as possible - and sometimes doing all the work for you.
  • Some of the splits likely affect a lot of birders. To name just a few:
  • Northern hemisphere birders probably have seen Mew Gull; that is now Short-billed Gull and Common Gull. If you're in Europe or Asia, it's overwhelmingly likely that you've seen Common Gull. If you're in the western part of North America, those are (almost) all Short-billed Gulls. Somewhere in-between? It's a hard ID problem!
  • In Asia, Siberian Stonechat is now split to Siberian and Amur Stonechat. This is another hard identification problem, though Amur is largely restricted to easternmost Asia, but in Southeast Asia this gets complicated! And if you saw a vagrant, and no one thought to collect DNA samples, you might need to live with it as a Siberian/Amur Stonechat "sp."
  • Elsewhere in the Palearctic, Subalpine Warbler, Black-eared Wheatear, and Lesser Short-toed Lark have each been split in two, mostly west vs. east, though again vagrant records are a challenge.
  • Other changes:
  • It's only been six weeks since the last release (when IOC 11.1 was released), so there hasn't been much time to get in other changes alongside the big taxonomic update, but here's a few changes that are worth noting:
  • eBird also changed their date format in downloaded checklists, which broke import - that's been fixed.
  • eBird locations with lat-long in their name are now handled more consistently (with the lat-long automatically extracted from their name)
  • Wildlife Recorder imports now will use either IOC or eBird/Clements depending on the current bird taxonomy, instead of just assuming the imports are always eBird/Clements.
  • Scythebill will tell you, on an import, what birds are new for your year list, but it used to so oddly when importing records from years other than the current one. Now it always reports based on the current year.

New in Scythebill 15.3.0 (Jul 16, 2021)

  • IOC 11.2:
  • IOC 11.2 was just released, and it's a big one! By my accounting, there's 82 different splits (and, yes, 1 lump), including the absolutely mega 12-way split of Rufous Antpitta, as well as a 3-way split of Green Bee-eater, the Mew Gull split into Common and Short-billed Gulls, and a whole lot more - especially for those of you who've birded southeast Asia extensively.
  • After updating, head to Special reports, then Splits and lumps, and see just what you gained and lost.
  • As always, checklists have been updated. Ranges of some of the migratory species (Atlas Wheatear, Siberian House Martin) are a bit speculative - let me know if you spot anything off.
  • Other changes:
  • It's been just a week or so since the last version of Scythebill was released (15.2.4), so there's not a lot new beyond that. (Though definitely check out the 15.2 blog post if you skipped that release for everything that happened there.)
  • One change may help users that have added their own custom checklists - Scythebill can now show combined custom checklists, not just combined built-in checklists. Just control-click (or command-click on MacOS) any two locations in "Browse by location" and Scythebill will generate an on-the-fly combined checklist.

New in Scythebill 14.1.1 (Aug 30, 2018)

  • Bug fixes and smaller features:
  • Scythebill spreadsheets saved in Browse by location now include a column with species numbers.
  • As always, there've been a number of improvements and corrections to the Scythebill country and state checklists. Specifically, the eBird/Clements and IOC checklists are now explicitly separate, which makes it possible to fix some subtle but long-standing pain points (like the range of Plain-backed vs Buffy Pipits).
  • A number of issues that made importing eBird files containing group names have been resolved, and these should import far more consistently.
  • If you've enabled "multiple observers", sightings entry has a new column with a list of observer abbreviations.
  • Scythebill has updated its internal libraries, and it is possible that this will significantly improve behavior on Windows machines with high-resolution displays. On the other hand, users that had manually made their font sizes much larger (with the View menu) may need to make the font sizes smaller again.
  • Scythebill was, for reasons not entirely understood but hopefully fixed, generating empty location names in some Birdlasser imports. These empty location names will automatically be changed to "Unnamed".
  • The "About" screen now has a scrollable area with information about all the extended taxonomies (previously, these might push off the bottom of the screen if you'd installed many of them!)

New in Scythebill 13.8 (Sep 8, 2017)

  • eBird/Clements 2017 Taxonomy:
  • The 2017 update is now available and supported in Scythebill.
  • See eBird's page on the update for an excellent summary of the species level changes, and Cornell's page, with details on all the 11(!!) new families and many species and subspecies changes. For North American birders, these reflect the recent American Ornithology Society (AOS, formerly AOU) changes.
  • As always, the update will be largely automatic. There's some finer details here where subspecies have been moved from Gray-eyed Bulbul into Olive Bulbul, from Fork-tailed Drongo-Cuckoo into Square-tailed Drongo-Cuckoo, and from Indian Scops-Owl into Collared Scops-Owl. If you have seen these species, you may need to reanalyze your sightings to be sure of what form you've seen.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Scythebill will now - on Windows - provide you with a warning if you're saving files into a "Program Files" directory and prompt you to move the file to another directory. Users have done this and, while it sometimes works, it often causes problems. (Do let me know if Scythebill is now a little too insistent at asking you to move out of this directory.)
  • Some Scythebill CSV imports with "spuh"s could fail under relatively unusual circumstances (but not so unusual that a user didn't find it!)
  • As always, Scythebill includes a number of smaller checklist improvements (along with the general updates to all of the checklists to reflect the new taxonomy).

New in Scythebill 13.7.0 (Aug 1, 2017)

  • Glossy Swiftlet has been split 8 ways!
  • Two southern Indian laughingthrushes (Black-chinned and Kerala) have each been split in two.
  • Silktail, an enigmatic Fijian endemic, has been split in two.
  • All of the recent AOS updates have been incorporated, including:
  • Thayer's Gull is, at long last, lumped into Iceland Gull.
  • Cassia Crossbill - a form endemic to southern Idaho - is split from Red Crossbill
  • Lesser Redpoll is (alas) split from Common Redpoll
  • Baird's Junco is split from Yellow-eyed Junco.
  • Great Grey Shrike has been split in two - the North American and eastern Asia forms are now Northern Shrike. (There are a few proven records of Northern Shrike in the Western Palearctic, and a lot of hypothetical records.)
  • Australasia improvements:
  • I've changed the definition of "Australasia" to more accurately match what denizens of that part of the world typically think, and now follow the Eremaea eBird definition. In particular, this means that the following locations are now in Australasia (and out of the Pacific Ocean region): New Zealand, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Norfolk, and Macquarie Island.
  • This definition does not follow the ABA listing regions. For those of you that care about that, I've added an "Australasia (ABA)" location that can be used in reports.
  • There's also a new checklist within this region, for "North Solomons (Bougainville)" (politically, part of Papua New Guinea, but biogeographically part of the Solomon Islands).
  • And for the truly nitpicking among you, I'm working with ABA rules committee members to clarify some as-yet ambiguous rules in some of their listing regions.
  • Location updates:
  • Scythebill has updated its location database to reflect the last couple years worth of changes (and to properly align with eBird). This should mostly be pretty transparent to all of you, but if you've been birding in Latvia and have been assigning sightings to Latvian districts, that work is likely for naught; its political organization is now totally different.
  • For the detail-oriented among you, the Åland Islands are no longer treated as a top-level country, but instead as a province of Finland; this means the "Finland (with Åland Islands)" location is no longer necessary or available.
  • Bug fixes:
  • BirdLasser imports should now be working again. (They removed a "Location name" column from their exports which Scythebill was expecting.)
  • eBird imports will work a little better in some rare cases. (They've added yet another date format, it seems.)
  • If you were building your own extended taxonomies, there were some glitches when entering sightings just after importing your own .csv taxonomy file. Those are fixed.
  • Scythebill's "choose your own abbreviation" feature did not work well for some accented characters found in Turkish names, in states like "Şırnak".
  • Entering IOC sightings for the Moluccan and North Solomons Dwarf Kingfishers did not assign those sightings to the correct species!

New in Scythebill 13.6.0 (Apr 22, 2017)

  • Bug fixes:
  • Checklists saved from Browse by location had two repeating rows at the top, instead of just the one intended header row.
  • Imports with "spuh" common names (like Greater/Lesser Scaup) will now import correctly.
  • Scythebill automatically sets "introduced" when you enter species that are known to be introduced (either from the checklists or simply because it's a domestic or feral form), but wasn't doing so for imports. It now does so correctly.
  • A glitch surrounding "First records (lifers)" reports for IOC users has been addressed.
  • The New Mexico county of Doña Ana displayed oddly, with a symbol where "ñ" should be.
  • A scenario where users could inadvertently corrupt their saved locations when rearranging them in Browse by locations has been fixed.
  • eBird locations were not available in the UK; that's been addressed.

New in Scythebill 13.4.1 (Jan 19, 2017)

  • Report improvements:
  • There's a new "Family" report option, which lets you select sightings from a single family. This is, perhaps, most useful in conjunction with "Special reports" - you can figure out in which country you've seen the most hummingbirds, or your best big day for waterfowl, and so forth.
  • The "IUCN Red List" report option was broken if you'd added any sightings in extended (non-bird) taxonomies.
  • The AOU region now properly includes Hawaii (as well as Midway, Clipperton Island, and Johnston Atoll). The ABA region intentionally does not include Hawaii, yet - the rules committee has not yet codified this change, but will in 2017.
  • Remembered "total ticks" reports did not get saved properly; they will now.
  • Import improvements:
  • Scythebill has long detected duplicate entries when importing. Previously, you only had the option of cancelling the entire import, or dropping the duplicates. Scythebill now offers another option - overwriting existing sightings with the duplicates. This is handy if you've improved the data in the original source. However, note that Scythebill only considers a sighting a duplicate if it's on the same date and is exactly the same taxon! So if you've updated a subspecies, for example, you'll end up with two sightings, since it won't look like a duplicate.
  • Ornitho imports should now properly handle Bean Goose imports. Absent a subspecies, they will be imported as a Tundra/Taiga Bean-Goose "spuh"; with a subspecies, they will be assigned correctly.
  • Observado imports will automatically set the "Photographed" bit and attach the URL of the Observado sighting if any photographs are included with that sighting.
  • eBird imports of the "life list" and "checklist" formats should now be more successful when you are importing from some non-English languages.
  • Other changes:
  • 13.4.0 added a new keyboard shortcut in Enter sightings lets you navigate between the detail rows of a table when entering sightings - but it chose a keystroke on Windows (Control-Alt-Up/Down) that was already taken. It now uses Shift-Alt-Up/Down.
  • As always, this version of Scythebill includes further checklist improvements. In particular, I've been working through all the eBird data, looking for species omitted from Scythebill checklists. As of this release, I've checked against every country (alphabetically) from Afghanistan to Syria.

New in Scythebill 13.4.0 (Dec 6, 2016)

  • This release adds support for importing from the "Ornitho" platform (for European bird reports), as well as some small (but much desired) features and bug fixes.
  • Ornitho imports:
  • The "Ornitho" platform encompasses a number of websites across Europe - Germany, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and parts of France and Spain. Scythebill now supports imports from this platform - the seventh different import format supported by Scythebill!
  • From the import screen, click the new "Import from Ornitho..." button, and choose a "TXT" format that you've extracted from Ornitho. (Unlike with HBW, there are no limits on the number of sightings that can be imported in one go.)
  • Before importing, it is strongly recommended to set the "Species name in IOC" preference to your local language. This will significantly improve the accuracy of your imports.
  • This support is early, and there may be glitches - especially since I've only been able to test against German and Swiss imports. Let me know if you run into any problems!
  • More information in checklist spreadsheets:
  • In Browse by location, you can use "Save as spreadsheet" to save checklists for field entry. A new option - "Include one sighting?" - will add a new column to those spreadsheets, which will tell you where you've already seen a species. This makes it possible - with a single checklist spreadsheet for a location - to figure out what species are potential lifers, which species have been seen in that location, and which species have been seen elsewhere.
  • "Sp." counts in Show Reports:
  • The Show reports screen will now show, as a separate tally, the total number of "sp."'s that match that report. This will - hopefully - allay some concerns users had when switching to IOC and seeing their species totals decline!
  • Faster data entry - a new shortcut:
  • A new keyboard shortcut in Enter sightings lets you navigate between the detail rows of a table when entering sightings. If you've got the cursor in a detail row - like entering a number - just press Control-Alt-Up/Down (or Command-Option-Up/Down on a Mac) and you'll move to the previous or next row, with the cursor in the very same field (like the number field) of that row.
  • This lets you rapidly edit sighting data, since you can edit one field for an entire visit without tediously opening each row in turn.
  • Other fixes:
  • Report printing did not work for IOC reports with a location with a checklist.
  • Scythebill's CSVs have - until now - had issues when being opened in Excel. In particular, if you had note fields containing double-quotes ("), those rows might not read correctly. This should be fixed now - do let me know if you run into problems with other spreadsheet software.
  • Scythebill CSV files should do a better job of "round-tripping" - exporting, then importing back - for some locations. In particular, Puerto Rico did not round-trip correctly (it was imported as a North American state, instead of into the West Indies).

New in Scythebill 13.3.2 (Nov 18, 2016)

  • Made improvements to the new Total Ticks code.

New in Scythebill 13.3.0 (Nov 10, 2016)

  • SPECIAL REPORTS:
  • Scythebill's reporting is powerful, but there's some things it can't do. Scythebill 13.3 adds the first "special" reports - pages that can give you fast answers to things some birders just need to know! This release offers two new such reports: Big days and years, Total ticks. I've also moved the "Lifer map" out of the File menu and into the Special reports page.
  • Big days and years report:
  • The first of the new special reports is "Big days and years". It'll let you quickly find your best birding days or years. Just click the new Special reports button on the main page, then click "Big" days and years. You'll immediately see your best big days anywhere. You can quickly choose big years with the "Big day" vs. "Big year" menu in the upper left of the page, and you can add the usual report options to limit the possibilities. And, of course, if you want to know what day you saw the most butterflies or mammals, etc. - this all works with extended taxonomies.
  • Total ticks report:
  • Some birders have started working on (and competing on) "total ticks" listing. A total ticks list adds up all of the totals from subregions into one big total. Click the new Special reports button on the main page, then click Total ticks. You'll immediately see your world "country" total ticks list - the sum of each of your individual country lists. And you can quickly switch to "state" or "county" total ticks, and limit to a location - so if you want your ABA state total ticks, that's easy, and if you want your California county total ticks, that's easy too!
  • But there's more! You can Remember... your total ticks, which will let you have a total tick report immediately calculated and always up-to-date on the main Scythebill page. And you can Save as spreadsheet..., which will save an .xslx file with one row per species, and one column per location, and formulas pre-added with totals.
  • OTHER CHANGES:
  • You can now use "Copy" - or drag - from Scythebill lists (like in Show reports or Browse by species or even the new Big day list) to get the text content into a document or your email.
  • The Print... option in Show reports now includes a more helpful page title describing your report.
  • Checklist improvements this time around include the standard batch of first country- or state-records, plus:
  • The Indonesian provinces of Maluku and Nusa Tenggara have been substantially augmented with a number of missing species.
  • The Hawaiian "northwestern islands" (Laysan, Midway, and the like) have been moved to a new "Midway" checklist which is part of the "United States Minor Outlying Islands" (these are not, in fact, administered by the state of Hawaii). However, many Hawaiian listers do include these islands - so there's now a new "Hawaii (with Northwestern Islands)" location available when generating reports.
  • BUG FIXES:
  • The "world lifer" map was broken if you'd entered any extended taxonomy sightings.
  • The Cut and Copy menu items did not work correctly for taking text out of a Notes field. (The keyboard shortcuts worked fine, but not the menu items).
  • Reports based on "IUCN Redlist" would - amusingly - treat "Rock Pigeon (Feral)" (and other feral and domestic forms) as beyond critically endangered!

New in Scythebill 13.2.5 (Oct 24, 2016)

  • IOC 6.4 taxonomy:
  • The IOC 6.4 taxonomy was just made available, and Scythebill already supports it! This includes 4 splits and three lumps; see the full list here.
  • Along with this taxonomy, Scythebill supports another two set of name translations for IOC - Icelandic and Indonesian (in each case, the species found in that country only).
  • Bugs fixed:
  • Three report options could break if you used extended taxonomies - "First Records", "Subspecies", and "Sp/Hybrid".
  • The "Sp/Hybrid?" report option did not work entirely correctly with the IOC taxonomy; it would sometimes show "spuh"s of eBird/Clements groups even when you only requested "species".
  • Checklist improvements:
  • Several species missing from each of the Sumatra and Java checklists.
  • The range of Large vs. Dark Hawk-Cuckoo was off.
  • Perija Tapaculo and Baliem Whistler were entirely missing from any checklists.
  • Several first country and state records are included, such as those from the Siberian Accentor invasion of Europe.

New in Scythebill 13.2.4 (Oct 11, 2016)

  • SMALL FEATURES:
  • If you find a visit in Browse by location, click Edit sightings..., and finish editing, Scythebill used to drop you back on the main menu. It now takes you right back to that visit, which makes it much, much easier to quickly edit a series of visits! Also, the list of visits is now inclusive of all taxonomies, which makes it easier to add extended taxonomy sightings (reptiles, butterflies, etc.) to existing visits with bird sightings.
  • When printing or exporting as a spreadsheet from Show reports, there's a new option - "Only countable sightings?". By default, Scythebill will include uncountable sightings (escapees, identification-not-certain, heard-only or introduced if you don't count those, etc.) in the printout or spreadsheet, but omit them from any total count. This will omit them altogether. This is especially useful if you're trying to identify your 1000th lifer with "Sort by date", since you won't have the uncountable sightings clogging up the works.
  • Printing from Show reports will now include a family count and the possible number of families for the selected location (or the world), if you select "Show families?". (That total includes extinct families, so if you think you've seen all 237 families, and are wondering what the 238th is, remember Mohoidae and feel sad.)
  • Extended taxonomies have a couple of new features:
  • A "Notes" column in your imports can attach taxonomic information about a species.
  • The subspecies column is a bit more forgiving - it can contain a full trinomial, instead of needing just the subspecies name.
  • IMPORT IMPROVEMENTS:
  • Taxonomic vagaries sometimes mean that the common name in an import refers to one species today, and the scientific name to another. Before, Scythebill would merely use the common name and stop. Now, Scythebill will create a "spuh" of both - unless only one of the two is on the checklist for a given country. (There's no easy answers, but this should reduce how often importing makes an undetected wrong guess.)
  • When Scythebill needs you to clarify a location name during import - because, for example, the import file just has a location name and no country, state, etc. - it will now let you choose a pre-existing location even if the location name isn't an exact match.
  • Scythebill is better at importing eBird checklists if you'd set your eBird preferences to use only a scientific name.
  • BirdLasser imports with a single failed row might fail the entire import. As with other imports, it now imports the successful rows and dumps the unsuccessful rows into a separate file. Also, the "LL:" notes added for per-sighting latitude and longitude in BirdLasser (and Observado) imports is now automatically stripped when re-exporting for eBird (as this seems a better privacy approach).
  • The eBird import format is a common export format for many birding apps; Scythebill is now a bit more liberal in allowing import of those files. This may smooth the process when importing from BirdJournal, in particular.
  • OTHER BUGS:
  • When entering species, dropping a photo on the "Photos" column did add the photo - but it did not set the "Photographed" checkbox. It does now.
  • Earlier buggy imports would sometimes import Hawaiian sightings into "United States (North America)" instead of "United States (Pacific Ocean)". This should now be fixed (and retroactively - locations should be cleaned up).
  • Likewise, some imports would import the Falkland Islands as a state of the United Kingdom. They are now moved to the Falkland Islands "country" in the Atlantic Ocean.
  • Several text panels used to start (inconveniently) scrolled to the bottom; this should not happen anymore.
  • Some cases where Windows users were forced to run Scythebill as an administrator to successfully save should now be resolved.
  • Lat/long location choosing in Indonesia should be somewhat better. (It's still not great.)
  • Checklist improvements were made several countries, including a couple dozen recent first records.

New in Scythebill 13.2.3 (Aug 22, 2016)

  • A fairly small bug-fix release.
  • Most notably, the "choose-your-own-abbreviations" feature now includes all common names and alternate names from groups and subspecies. This is very helpful for extended taxonomies that assign common names to subspecies - this is very common practice for reptiles and butterflies, for example - but also makes it faster to enter some existing bird forms (e.g., "Cayenne Tern", which a subspecies of Sandwich/Cabot's Tern).
  • Other changes and fixes include:
  • The fix in 13.2 for export-as-spreadsheet with subspecies was only halfway there; it should now be working for IOC users too.
  • Some users importing from Birdbase would have locations with empty names; that's now fixed.
  • Users who imported content from sources with emoticons could have entirely broken sightings files! They'll now be saved and read without issue.
  • Bulk deletes would sometimes produce an error message (though the bulk delete was correctly performed).
  • Courtesy of Steve Clark, the Australian state of Victoria now has a semi-official checklist.

New in Scythebill 13.2.1 (Aug 15, 2016)

  • An error if you had splits to resolve, and the last selected taxonomy before upgrading was an extended taxonomy.
  • An error if you had sightings for the UK - but not anything more specific (England, Scotland, etc.) - and those species were split in the latest eBird/Clements (e.g. Leach's Storm Petrel).

New in Scythebill 13.2.0 (Aug 15, 2016)

  • eBird/Clements 2016 taxonomy:
  • Just released this past week, and Scythebill already supports it! You can read all about the changes on the Cornell website.
  • When you run the new version, Scythebill will automatically upgrade all of your sightings, taking advantage of the (also upgraded).
  • As part of this upgrade, Scythebill now supports 3 more translations for common names:
  • Swedish
  • Bulgarian (only for species found in Bulgaria)
  • Polish (only for species found in Poland)
  • Extended taxonomy fixes:
  • Extended taxonomies had problems when a subspecies had a common name, but the species doesn't; that's fixed. The documentation in the manual's now clearer for how to enter subspecies in the first place!
  • People using checklist-entry-mode for their bird sightings saw errors when entering extended taxonomy sightings (in some cases). These should be fixed.
  • Small changes and fixes:
  • Scythebill uses per-location latitude and longitude; BirdLasser and Observado use per-sighting latitude and longitude. Scythebill now preserves the per-sighting latitude and longitude in the note field of each sighting, with the following format: "LL:-26.1713505,27.9699842".
  • As always, a number of first country and state records have been added to Scythebill, and the US records of Great-winged Petrel are now correctly identified as Grey-faced Petrel.
  • Other bugs fixed include:
  • Editing problems with "leap day" (February 29).
  • "Export as spreadsheet" was not correctly displaying common names for subspecies.
  • If your Internet connection was having problems during new location entry, potentially confusing errors were shown.

New in Scythebill 13.1.0 (Jul 22, 2016)

  • Highlights
  • The brand-new IOC 6.3 taxonomy
  • Improvements for extended taxonomies
  • Several smaller improvements

New in Scythebill 13.0.0 (Jul 11, 2016)

  • The highlight of this release is a much-anticipated new feature: extended taxonomies! Now, you can keep track of your mammal sightings, your butterfly sightings, your bryophyte records - anything you want.
  • Related changes:
  • Removed the Full Scythebill export… menu item. This was never really the right way to backup or transfer your sightings - use Save as... for that, and with extended taxonomies, it was going to be a very poor choice, as it would only export one taxonomy at a time. (If you really want exports in CSV format, they're still available inside Show reports.)
  • Scythebill's automatic backups are now stored as .zip files. This makes them about 8 or 9 times smaller, which was useful before, but is very important now that extended taxonomies make sightings files even larger.
  • Import improvements:
  • When an import contains some duplicates, Scythebill used to warn you, but only let you import everything or drop everything. Now it'll let you drop the duplicates, and import the rest.
  • Avisys imports do a better job of importing Bonaire and Curaçao sightings, and Scythebill should be generally better at getting your imported sightings into the right place for countries split across multiple regions (e.g. Turkey, Russia, Indonesia, etc.).
  • Avisys field note imports should also work more consistently.
  • Observado.org imports are better in a couple of ways. Lat/long will be included (though one per location, not one per sighting). Also, Observado "sp." sightings are supported - so "Phylloscopus collybita / trochilus" will be correctly imported into Scythebill as a "sp.".
  • Some instances were Scythebill would mistakenly import to a nominate subspecies instead of the parent species have been fixed.
  • Smaller changes:
  • MacOS users should no longer see errors that Scythebill is "damaged". Please do let me know if you're still seeing this.
  • Scythebill will now show the full path to a photo file as hover-text. This is useful for resolving broken links. And speaking of photo files, on Windows Scythebill should do a much better job of opening files in your desired photo viewer (and let you open PDFs or other non-image files).
  • Compact printing (still) does not work in Safari. It's a Safari bug, not something I can fix, but Scythebill will now warn you.
  • Finally, there's the usual set of checklist tweaks, including improvements from the Seychelles, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, England, Ireland, Denmark, Austria, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, France, Armenia, Georgia, Nepal, Angola, South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia, Paraguay, United Arab Emirates, Guam, Canada as well as a few US states and Canadian provinces.

New in Scythebill 12.9.1 (May 3, 2016)

  • The "Print..." option in "Show Reports" has a new "Compact print?" option, which displays species lists in a much denser, 3 column form. My life list required 131 pages the old way, but "only" takes 34 pages this way. (I've seen a lot...)
  • County locations are more clearly marked throughout Scythebill, which helps disambiguate "Los Angeles" (the city) from "Los Angeles" (the county), and so forth.
  • I've fixed up a couple of IOC mappings, most particularly for the "poensis" subspecies of Western Barn Owl.
  • There's the usual batch of checklist tweaks, most particularly for Mauritania.
  • ... and some smaller things you might not notice.

New in Scythebill 12.9.0 (Apr 22, 2016)

  • This version includes the just-released IOC 6.2 taxonomy, support for importing Avisys Field Notes, international names for the eBird/Clements taxonomy, and more.
  • IOC 6.2:
  • The IOC 6.2 taxonomy was finalized yesterday, and Scythebill already supports it, including updates to all Scythebill checklists! You can get a full list of species-level changes - mostly splits in Cuckoo-Doves and (Australasian) Catbirds. They've also mercifully restored "Diademed Sandpiper-Plover" to its rightful full name and made a lot of passerine subspecies changes.
  • Avisys field notes:
  • Avisys let users store "field notes" - free-form text like Scythebill's "Notes' field. But those notes never made it to the exports file, so Scythebill has been blind to them.
  • New in 12.9, Scythebill lets you import Field Notes too. The process is a bit more involved (five more steps than an import without them), since you need to make Avisys produce a second file containing the field notes, then give both files to Scythebill. The Scythebill manual has already been updated.
  • eBird/Clements international names:
  • Scythebill 11 added support for international names in the IOC taxonomy. Scythebill 12.9 adds support for international names in the eBird/Clements taxonomy! You can now pick from 42 different sets of international IOC names, including 6 different English options and 11 different Spanish options. Visit the eBird page about Common Name Translations in eBird to find out more. To set this, just visit the Preferences page and choose the new Species names (eBird/Clements) preference.
  • Smaller features:
  • When entering sightings, you'll get a running total of the species count in the upper-right. (It ignores hybrids and "sp's" and only counts multiple subspecies once.)
  • There's now a checklist for Kosovo, courtesy of courtesy of Qenan Maxhuni! There's also a bunch of first-country records, many courtesy of the new Facebook Global Rare Bird Alert group.
  • Scythebill will now detect and warn you if you've set the Scythebill font size large enough that critical parts of the page are offscreen.
  • Scythebill now has a number of additional "- in part" alternate names; as a practical effect, this helps Scythebill do a better job importing some recent splits, e.g. it can automatically import "Common Kestrel" in South Africa as Rock Kestrel.
  • There's also now a new "magic" location in Show reports - "Ireland (Island of)" - which will include sightings in either the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland.

New in Scythebill 12.8.3 (Mar 15, 2016)

  • This is largely a bug-fix release, though the specific bug is one that's lately been a thorn in the side of many of Scythebill's users. If you write lat/long coordinates as "37.7833 -122.4167", you've been fine. But if you write them as "37,7833 -122,4167" (with commas as decimal separators), you've likely run into any number of problems, with error dialogs, or location maps not loading, or "Search nearby" failing... These should all be resolved, though (of course) let me know if you're still seeing problems.
  • Scythebill also now includes an "English (United Kingdom)" preference for IOC bird names. When chosen, Scythebill will use names the Queen herself would approve of - Arctic Skua (not Parasitic Jaeger), Guillemot (not Common Murre), and a simple Robin, Wren, Swallow, Goldfinch, etc. These alternate names are only available for species on the British list; for the rest of the world, you'll have to put up with the standard IOC names. Also, this only affects naming, not taxonomy. So Bean Goose is still split, "Hudsonian Whimbrel" is still lumped, and so forth.
  • Other changes include:
  • The Western Australia checklist is now in agreement with an official one, thanks to Martin Cake.
  • A wide variety of first-country records from around the world have been added, as well as some simpler errors (like Spot-flanked Gallinule's presence in Bolivia).
  • When adding a "remembered" report, you can overwrite a report with an existing name instead of being forced to choose a different name.
  • BirdLasser imports are a bit more aggressive at merging sightings into a single "visit".
  • Scythebill gives a more informative error if saving should fail.

New in Scythebill 12.8.2 (Feb 16, 2016)

  • Easier subspecies editing:
  • Previously, the only straightforward way to allocate sightings to subspecies after initial data entry was to visit Browse by species and manually drag species onto the desired subspecies.
  • Now, any time you've selected one (or more) sightings (from any page), you'll see a new menu.
  • You can use this menu to move that sighting (or sightings) to a new subspecies. The range of each subspecies will appear when selected; but if you'd like to see all the ranges at once, click (range summary...) and you'll get an overview of just that.
  • And if you're a true obsessive for subspecies entry, there's a new option in Show reports. Ask for "subspecies" "is not allocated", and you'll get all the sightings that are not yet assigned to subspecies (but could be - monotypic species are not included).
  • Better multiple-file support:
  • If multiple people want to keep lists with Scythebill on the same computer, they need to create multiple .bsxm files. That works fine - but each time it's opened, Scythebill has only re-opened one of those files (the last one opened).
  • Now, Scythebill will re-open all the files, each time.
  • Bugs fixed:
  • Scythebill 12.8.0 introduced a bug that affected first-time users; those that imported directly from the first screen could fail with an error. That's fixed (and that's the reason for this release coming when it does).
  • Observado/Waarnemingen imports now correctly support provinces identified like "Bruxelles/Brussel".
  • The "Verify against checklists..." report now properly ignores sightings marked as "Domestic".
  • The country code "ZO" is now supported for Avisys imports as "South Polar Region".

New in Scythebill 12.8.1 (Feb 1, 2016)

  • There's now a Delete all... button inside Show reports -> Bulk edit... which lets you delete a slew of entries all at once. Second, there's a couple of bug fixes for the "First records (Lifers)" report option.

New in Scythebill 12.8.0 (Jan 28, 2016)

  • IOC 6.1 checklist:
  • The IOC 6.1 checklist was released just yesterday, and Scythebill's already upgraded. For the world listers out there, highlights include splits to Sedge Wren, Striolated Puffbird, and Snowy-browed Flycatcher.
  • Imports are even easier:
  • Scythebill has, historically, taken the English and scientific names of birds in your imports very literally. This meant that splits and lumps could leave you with old sightings still attached to old species boundaries. Scythebill now does a much better job, by using a wealth of alternate names (many pre-existing, and many newly added) and combining those with the Scythebill checklists to give you much better results.
  • Other fixes:
  • BirdLasser imports were always importing sightings as January! Thankfully, this is now fixed prior to February's arrival.
  • "Verify against checklists" used to produce corrections that bounced around the world at random; it now outputs in a fairly predictable, sane order
  • As always, some small improvements were made to checklists
  • The Western Sahara checklist is substantially improved
  • Smaller changes were made for Tanzania, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia
  • A number of recent "firsts" for countries in the Western Palearctic and US states are added

New in Scythebill 12.7.1 (Jan 3, 2016)

  • The new BirdLasser import failed for some date formats; it now should reliably import.
  • Also, location detection would sometimes fail to detect the state/province of a location (only finding the country); it should now be more reliable.

New in Scythebill 12.7.0 (Dec 28, 2015)

  • Location entry improvements:
  • When you were entering a new location, Scythebill previously would first show you a latitude and longitude from a Google service. If you wanted to get information from eBird, you had to click another button ("Ignore Google result?") to get to it. Now Scythebill will load from both simultaneously, so it's much easier to get to eBird results.
  • Also, once you have a latitude and longitude entered, Scythebill will show you a new Search nearby button. This will look for eBird and Google results near that location. This makes it much easier to pick eBird hotspots.
  • Easier access to visit data:
  • Visit data - like comments, distance covered, duration, eBird protocol - used to be fairly buried, hidden away in Browse by location. It's still there - but it's now much easier to get to. Any time you're looking at a single sighting, you'll have a Visit data... button.
  • Domestic forms:
  • Scythebill now has explicit "domestic" forms of Mallard, Greylag Goose, Swan Goose, Muscovy Duck, Helmeted Guineafowl, Indian Peafowl, Red Junglefowl (aka "Chicken"), Wild Turkey, Budgerigar, African ("Ringed") Turtle Dove, and Cockatiel, as well as a feral form of Muscovy Duck (for the fully wild Florida population that is derived from domestic birds).
  • Domestic forms are never countable - they're used for those flocks of domestic ducks (and others) that might have some wild genes remaining, but are genetically not the same as wild individuals, even if they are established, breeding populations. They are, nonetheless, very much part of the eBird taxonomy, and this will make it much easier to export to (and import from) eBird when you've recorded these individuals.
  • You can store domestic sightings of any other species as well, with the new Domestic sighting status option.
  • BirdLasser imports:
  • Scythebill now supports imports from BirdLasser, an Android and iOS app for recording South African bird sightings. This support is somewhat experimental, as BirdLasser has a very different location model (latitude/longitude for each sighting) from Scythebill; Scythebill will do what it can to automatically find nearby locations using eBird and Google. Let me know how this works if you can try it!
  • Other import improvements:
  • Some eBird checklists wouldn't import (as they had a hitherto-unknown-to-me date format); that's now fixed.
  • Avisys exports now proceed smoothly even when most of the rightmost columns have been removed.
  • New features:
  • There's a new Backup now... button on the preferences page, if you want to force an immediate backup after lots of data entry.
  • The "Complete list of sightings?" checkbox was far too easy to overlook when entering sightings. I've added another place to select that option on the prior page, where the rest of the visit information is entered.
  • Scythebill now allows you to enter "Dead" as a sighting status, for those unfortunate occasions when you record a deceased bird. Such sightings will never be counted as lifers or any other species totals, but will be included in eBird exports.
  • Finally, there's a new Location description field in Scythebill CSV exports and imports.
  • Checklist improvements:
  • This time around, there's a number of small improvements to the checklists of the Azores, France, Sulawesi, Mauritania, Morocco, Uruguay, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, and New Zealand, as well as a number of first country records from the Western Palearctic and first provincial records from Canada.
  • Bugs fixed:
  • The built-in state checklists for Indonesian states will now be available even if you've rearranged the built-in locations a bit (moving Indonesia to an "Oriental Region" or something similar).
  • Bulk date editing would fail if you only entered a partial date (e.g. changing the year of a large number of records). That's fixed.
  • If you dragged photos into Scythebill on MacOS, those photos might fail to display when later clicked-on. That's fixed too.
  • A couple of uncommon (and harmless but annoying) cases where error dialogs would appear have been fixed.

New in Scythebill 12.6.0 (Oct 28, 2015)

  • The highlight for the world taxonomy crowd will likely be the IOC 5.4 world list, released just a couple of days ago. But there's more:
  • You can view species range maps with a single click.
  • Correcting the dates and locations of your visits is now much easier.
  • States now list their endemics - and multi-state generation has improved to go along with it.
  • There's new checklists for each of the seven main Indonesian regions, and one for the Åland Islands.
  • Some long-necessary cleanup for the Scythebill state and province lists has completed, most noticeably changing Ireland, the Philippines, and Sudan.
  • IOC 5.4:
  • The new IOC 5.4 taxonomy is available, and Scythebill already supports it! Taxonomic highlights include a swarm of kingfisher splits and a three-way Paradise Flycatcher split
  • Some smaller features:
  • Scythebill now lets you view species range maps at a click. When you see the word Range underlined - either entering species, or in Browse by taxon, click, and you'll get a map like this one, which not only show you the world range, country by country, but also let you zoom into regions of the world, and even the per-state maps in the United States, Canada, and Australia. (Look for the menu at the top-left of the map.) These maps are limited - they only show distribution at the country (and sometimes state) level - but they do provide a very quick way to get a feel for a bird's range (and, sometimes, to spot mistakes in the Scythebill checklists).
  • When you select a single visit in Browse by location, you can now change the date and location of that visit right from that page without leaving it.
  • There's a new Save a copy as... menu item in the File menu, which will save a second copy of the Scythebill ".bsxm" file (especially useful for moving your list to a second machine or manually backing up). Hopefully, this will make it a little clearer to users that "
  • State endemics:
  • Scythebill has long identified the per-country endemics, but it now also identifies bird species that are globally endemic to a single state, like Yellow-billed Magpie in California or Rockwarbler in New South Wales, etc.
  • And the trivial multi-state-or-country checklist generation added in Scythebill 12.5 goes along for the ride. So you can now even generate a checklist combining - for example - California and Mexico - and see the global endemics shared between them!
  • Indonesian improvements:
  • Scythebill now has checklists for the seven main eBird regions of Indonesia
  • Sumatera (Sumatra)
  • Jawa (Java, but not Bali)
  • Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo)
  • Nusa Tenggara (Bali and the Lesser Sundas)
  • Maluku (Moluccas, including Wetar and the Aru Islands)
  • Papua (the Indonesian half of New Guinea)
  • Sulawesi
  • Geolocation was also slightly tweaked so that Google-identified locations now will map to these regions
  • Checklist improvements:
  • As mentioned above, there's now checklists for each of the Indonesian states
  • There's also a new checklist for the Åland Islands
  • I've done a lot of cleanup for the US state checklists
  • The range of Caspian Gull had not followed taxonomic changes - it's now a monotypic form, with "barabensis" moved to Lesser Black-backed Gull, and "mongolicus" moved to Vega Gull (Herring Gull in eBird/Clements). It's now changed accordingly - I'd recommend checking your records
  • Abdel B. contributed some improvements for Tunisia and Hong Kong
  • State and province cleanup:
  • Scythebill tries to hold to the eBird location organization. (It's fairly close to the standard ISO-3166 arrangement, for those who care about such details.) But it's missed some of the changes made in the last few years. In most cases, these were trivial (some simple name changes), but there were a few major issues that would have made eBird importing difficult.
  • eBird no longer uses the 26 counties of Ireland as "states", instead using the 4 Irish provinces. Scythebill now puts all of the above in its proper place, automatically.
  • Scythebill still had the out-of-date Sudanese states prior to the split-off of South Sudan. Those who bravely bird this part of the world will be happy that Scythebill automatically moves sightings from the old Sudanese provinces into South Sudan where necessary.
  • eBird (and now Scythebill) use the 82 provinces of the Philippines instead of the 15 regions.
  • Additionally:
  • Scythebill now includes the 23 districts of the Seychelles, 7 districts of the Cayman Islands, 5 divisions of French Polynesia, and 4 municipalties of the Northern Mariana Islands, as well as multiple added regions of (deep breath now) Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Chile, Colombia, Congo, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Libya, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Moldova, Morocco, Mozambique, Nepal, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Romania, Saint Lucia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Taiwan Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Vietnam, and Yemen. (Phew.)
  • Scythebill had the wrong codes for the Yukon Territory of Canada and Maluku province of Indonesia, which would have made importing into eBird unnecessarily difficult.
  • Other fixes:
  • BirdBase imports now correctly import species counts.
  • eBird "geocoding" (finding latitude/longitude based on a location name) was broken for location names with accents. (eBird changed their API's encoding, Scythebill had to change to match.)
  • eBird "life list" CSV files with accented characters will now be correctly imported.

New in Scythebill 12.5.1 (Oct 12, 2015)

  • Fixes a bug when entering sightings for a new location.
  • Further improvements for importing from Observado.org and Waarnemingen.be/.nl.

New in Scythebill 12.5 (Oct 12, 2015)

  • Scythebill now supports automatic weekly or monthly backups of your sightings.
  • Scythebill can trivially generate checklists for multiple countries together.
  • Observado.org and Birdbase importing is improved.
  • Clicking on maps makes it easy to tweak latitude and longitude.
  • Data entry is even faster!

New in Scythebill 12.4.2 (Aug 25, 2015)

  • Added a fix for an error screen right at start-up.

New in Scythebill 12.4.1 (Aug 24, 2015)

  • Highlights:
  • the names of files saved from Scythebill were missing file extensions (".csv", ".xls", etc.).
  • Scythebill 12.4.0 renamed the country of "Burma" to its official name, Myanmar. If you had manually entered (or imported) Myanmar as a country, upgrading to 12.4.0 could result in having corrupted location data. No sightings were lost, but location names could be lost.
  • Importing eBird checklists with very long names (anything over 5 words) would fail to find existing locations with matching names.
  • Avisys and Birdbase imports with note data containing a backslash ("\") could fail.
  • Finally, there's a few small checklist improvements.

New in Scythebill 12.4.0 (Aug 20, 2015)

  • Highlights:
  • The eBird/Clements 2015 taxonomy is now available
  • You can import directly from BirdBase exports!

New in Scythebill 12.3.0 (Aug 4, 2015)

  • The IOC 5.3 checklist - released 4 days ago - is now available.
  • Checklists have been massively improved, and are now globally cleaned up
  • There's also a few small features added this time around, most importantly better support for those of you who don't "count" introduced or heard-only species.

New in Scythebill 12.2.0 (May 18, 2015)

  • HIGHLIGHTS:
  • A quick and simple way to answer more checklist questions
  • An interactive map of country-by-country lifers around the world
  • Geographic cleanup of offshore islands for many countries, with a lot more "magic" locations to track full country lists.
  • Lots more checklist corrections and new checklists - all of the Americas are done.
  • ANSWER MORE CHECKLIST QUESTIONS:
  • The Scythebill checklists have made it easy to find out what lifers you can see in hundreds of areas of the world. And you can always find out what would be new for your list right there - what Indian species would be new for your Indian list, for example. But they haven't let you answer questions like:
  • What species in a US state would be new for an ABA list?
  • What rarities of the Canary Islands would be new for your Western Palearctic list?
  • What Australian birds would be new for your year list?
  • All these questions are easy to answer now!
  • INTERACTIVE LIFER MAPS:
  • Scythebill's new Map of world lifers... menu item (in the File menu) brings up a map of the world with each country color-coded for how many lifers are waiting for you there.
  • You can also zoom into a specific region of the world with a small menu in the upper left.
  • GEOGRAPHIC CLEANUP:
  • Many countries around the world have offshore states or territories that do not fit into ordinary geographic bounds. For example, the US state of Hawaii is in the Pacific Ocean, not North America, so that needs to be separated to keep our "North America" lists in proper form. I've cleaned this up for a number of other countries:
  • Australia has "lost" a number of offshore territories. The Ashmore and Cartier Islands and the Coral Sea Islands have independent entries. (Norfolk and Macquarie Islands already had their own entries.)
  • The Colombian department of "San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina" has been moved to the West Indies.
  • South Africa's "Prince Edward and Marion Islands" have their own entry in the Indian Ocean.
  • The Netherlands Antilles have been divided in two. The West Indies portion comprises Sint Maarten, Sint Eustatius, and Saba. The South American portion includes Bonaire and Curaçao. (Aruba left the Netherlands Antilles in 1986, and is its own country in the Kingdom of the Netherlands).
  • Spain's "exclaves" of Ceuta and Melilla have been moved moved into Africa.
  • All of this is more geographically accurate, to be sure, but it made calculating a full country list much harder. To fix this, I've added a slew of "magic" locations:
  • Australia (with dependent territories)
  • Chile (with offshore islands)
  • China (with administrative regions)
  • Colombia (with Caribbean islands)
  • United Kingdom (with dependent territories)
  • United States (with dependent territories)
  • Ecuador (with Galapagos)
  • France (with Overseas Territories)
  • New Zealand (with Tokelau)
  • Portugal (with Azores and Madeira)
  • Spain (with Canary Islands, Ceuta, and Melilla)
  • Norway (with Bouvet Island and Svalbard)
  • Finland (with Åland Islands)
  • Kingdom of Denmark
  • Kingdom of the Netherlands
  • South Africa (with Prince Edward and Marion Islands)
  • You can find the full definition of each of these in the online manual.
  • CHECKLIST IMPROVEMENTS:
  • Lots of checklists have been cleaned up in this release. In particular, I've finished manually verifying and setting rarity status checklists for all of North America (including Central America and the West Indies), making this the third completed continent (after South America and Africa); this required corrections to:
  • All of the Canadian provinces and territories
  • Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, and Greenland
  • (Whenever I tackle this, I tend to find some humorous mistakes. This time the winner came from the El Salvador checklist, which was missing Great Blue Heron - and instead had Great-billed Heron, which would be an impressive range extension from southeast Asia!)
  • I've also reconciled the checklists (setting "rarity" status and adding/removing species as needed) for:
  • Portugal (removing birds recorded only on the Azores or Madeira)
  • Spain (removing birds found only recorded from the Canary Islands or Ceuta and Melilla)
  • France
  • Belgium
  • Greece
  • Australia
  • New Zealand
  • Socotra Island
  • Seychelles
  • Netherlands Antilles
  • Faroe Islands
  • Madeira
  • Azores
  • And there are brand new checklists for:
  • Heard Island and MacDonald Islands
  • Macquarie Island
  • Easter Island
  • Juan Fernandez Island (and its endemics removed from Chile)
  • Curaçao
  • Bonaire
  • Niue
  • Svalbard and Jan Mayen
  • Saint Pierre et Miquelon
  • Coral Sea Islands
  • Ashmore and Cartier Islands
  • There's additional, smaller fixes in southern Africa, the Indian Ocean, Costa Rica, and Peru.
  • FIXED BUGS:
  • I've fixed a couple of problems with the photos code added in the last release.
  • If a photo was moved or deleted, and Scythebill couldn't find it, you'd get an unfriendly error message. Now, you can relocate the photo and fix the problem.
  • Under some circumstances, Scythebill might not save added photos.

New in Scythebill 12.1.0 (Apr 27, 2015)

  • HIGHLIGHTS:
  • Attach photos - either from files or the web - to your sightings!
  • IOC 5.2 is available the very same day it's released!
  • Many, many improved checklists (including an entire continent!)
  • Some important "geocoding" and eBird bugs are fixed
  • PHOTO ATTACHMENTS:
  • Scythebill now lets you attach photos - both files and webpages - to your sightings. This has been requested for a long time, and it's finally available.
  • IOC 5.2 TAXONOMY:
  • The IOC 5.2 taxonomy was just released today, and Scythebill's already up-to-date! You can find the list of species-level changes here. As always, the checklists have already been updated (though I admit I'm guessing a bit at the wintering range of Chinese vs. European Blackbird in southeast Asia).
  • UPDATED CHECKLISTS - ALL OF AFRICA:
  • IOC 5.2 came out a little bit later than I imagined, and I took advantage of this time by cleaning up all of the African checklists, including Atlantic and Indian Ocean islands near Africa. They're definitely vastly better - with some embarrassing mistakes cleaned up (Broad-tailed Grassbird in Africa?!?) - but it's possible some errors have been introduced. If you've travelled in Africa, please use Verify against checklists... in the File menu and let me know what you find.
  • There's also brand-new checklists for:
  • Norfolk Island (with its endemics removed from the Australia checklist)
  • Mayotte (with its endemics removed from the Comoros checklist)
  • East Timor (also known as Timor-Leste), Nauru, and Clipperton Island
  • Finally, there have been some smaller fixes to checklists in East Asia and Great Britain.
  • BUGS FIXED:
  • A few bugs were fixed with the "geocoding" support added in Scythebill 12.0 - automatically grabbing lat/long and county names from Google and eBird. Most of the combinations are obscure - but particular thanks to Sara M. for finding and reporting the most conspicuous of them.
  • Three bugs were fixed when importing from eBird:
  • Some eBird exports are produced with 2 year dates - "1/1/15" instead of "1/1/2015". Scythebill parsed those as the year 15 - yes, just 15 - which is probably not what you wanted. That's fixed, and Scythebill will automatically clean up your sightings as soon as they're loaded if you've encountered this bug.
  • If eBird exported time in AM/PM format, Scythebill completely failed to parse any time starting with "12:".
  • Scythebill failed altogether to load eBird imports with some stranger "sp." combinations (in particular Merganser sp. - Mergus/Mergellus/Lophodytes sp.).

New in Scythebill 12.0.0 (Mar 9, 2015)

  • HIGHLIGHTS:
  • Greatly improved location support
  • 24 newly reconciled checklists - the United States and West Indies are (almost) done!
  • Observado.org and Waarneming import support
  • CHECKLIST IMPROVEMENTS:
  • The last of the states in the United States is done! Kentucky was cleaned up by Bill D., and the wonderfully helpful Zack W. took care of Maine, Maryland, Hawaii, Florida, and the District of Colombia!
  • I've handled (almost all) of the West Indies - Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Bermuda, the British and US Virgin Islands, Cayman Island, Cuba... you get the point. (The Netherland Antilles and (French) St. Martin aren't done yet; information on these is harder to come by.)
  • Abdel B. contributed a number of corrections - mostly southeast Asia, but also some African fixes too.
  • OTHER FIXES AND IMPROVEMENTS:
  • Western Whistler - a species newly available in the last IOC update - can now be entered. (I invented a new Clements subspecies of Golden Whistler for those who want to enter this in Clements to be ready for the future.)
  • The "Domestic Form" of Rock Pigeon now imports cleanly into eBird.
  • Reports now show a family count next to the species count. Thanks to Eric S. for the idea!
  • If you use the arrow keys to navigate while entering species, a few species of context at the top and bottom always stay visible - again, thanks to Eric S. for the suggestion.
  • You can now edit the "Complete list of sightings?" setting for a visit after initial entry.
  • An error message that could appear when creating a new .bsxm file - especially for first time users - has been fixed.
  • If you clicked the "Back" button while entering sightings, you lost all your work and had to re-enter everything. (Ugh.) It's been fixed.

New in Scythebill 2013 10.5.0 (Jul 28, 2014)

  • Scythebill, now with a manual - You can access it from the help menu.
  • Checklist improvements:
  • Whenever you visit Enter sightings for a location that has a checklist (built-in or custom), you'll see a new option near the top of the screen
  • Reporting improvements:
  • Scythebill now lets you generate more complex report conditions.
  • There's a new Southern Africa region for the African listers out there.
  • You can now query for female/male/adult/immature sightings
  • Reports looking at the notes field are now case-insensitive (by default - you can get case-sensitivity if you want)
  • Ever tried to issue a report for wintering birds, say, sightings between December and March? It didn't work. It does now. (Thanks to Yann M. for pointing this out.)
  • You can now bulk edit locations in a report, so if you accidentally put a few hundred records in Swaziland instead of Switzerland, it's easy to fix.
  • Importing improvements:
  • Almost all of the columns are now optional. You can import with a mere three columns of data.
  • Odds and ends:
  • Scythebill's now greatly improved at keyboard interaction, particularly when entering sightings.

New in Scythebill 2013 10.1.2 (Jan 17, 2014)

  • IOC 4.1:
  • Scythebill 10.1.2 includes the IOC 4.1 list. This list was released only two days ago! So not only are taxonomy upgrades always free (of course), but they're also released faster than any other program.
  • IOC ranges should be much better in this release, especially for species with large ranges - whereas earlier versions might merely say "Widespread", Scythebill now says "Widespread Africa" or "Widespread Pacific Oceans" (to give two examples).
  • Of course, since Scythebill now includes checklists, this also means that all the country and state checklists have been upgraded to IOC 4.1 and ranges adjusted for the new splits. So I'll take this as another opportunity to plug "Verify against checklists..." in the File menu: please, try this against your life list and send me the results! Users' submissions have been invaluable in improving the quality of the checklists, so please keep them coming.
  • Other changes:
  • When exporting reports as spreadsheets, you can now get a column containing counts. Thanks to Sharon W. for the feature request.
  • Location entry now includes a (hopefully) more informative and intuitive display of the location hierarchy.
  • Dragging "sp." sightings to species resulted in weird UI glitches and the potential for error dialogs; this has been fixed. Thanks to Ben N. for the report.

New in Scythebill 2013 10.0.0 (Nov 19, 2013)

  • CHECKLISTS:
  • This is a feature-packed release, but the biggest of the new features is checklist support! Scythebill 10.0 includes checklists for over 200 countries and over 150 states, provinces, and counties - including all the states of the US and Australia, all the provinces of Canada, and many British counties.
  • ONE-OFF SIGHTING ENTRY AND DELETION:
  • Both the Browse by species and Browse by location screens now have a button at the bottom-right.
  • It's either "Add sighting" or "Remove sighting" depending on what you've got selected, and:
  • On Browse by species, "Add sighting" will add a sighting of a species (or subspecies) with no date or location (though you can immediately add either or both). This is oh so much simpler than going back through Enter sightings!
  • On Browse by location, "Add sighting" will add a sighting of a species at the currently location. It nicely dovetails with checklists, as you can use this to go through a list of species on a checklist and mark which ones you've seen.
  • In either screen, if you've got one or more sightings selected, you can easily delete them.
  • EASIER ACCESS TO ALL LOCATIONS:
  • Scythebill 9.4.0 added all the states/provinces of the world, as well as all the counties of the United States and Great Britain. But, alas, these were rather buried. They're not anymore. You can get to all those locations immediately from any location box. And, better, when you're picking a location (say, Brazil), Scythebill will show you Brazil followed by all the states of Brazil.
  • There's a variety of more subtle location improvements:
  • Forget whether you entered a location as "Mount Fuji" or "Mt. Fuji"? "Saint Thomas" or "St. Thomas"? Doesn't matter anymore - "mtfu" or "mofu", "sath" or "stth" will work no matter which you entered.
  • The countries of the Caucasus are now correctly in Asia.
  • The Azores was missing... it's not anymore.
  • A variety of country codes have been fixed behind the scenes. (This will make things a bit easier if you're uploading data to eBird)
  • WESTERN PALEARCTIC REPORT:
  • Scythebill has long supported reporting on your ABA and AOU lists. It now supports a Western Palearctic list as well! Thanks to Jochen B. for the idea (and for finding glitches in my first implementation). Just go to Show reports, and choose "Western Palearctic" as a location.
  • CUSTOMIZE YOUR REPORTS:
  • Report output is far more customizable now. Reports can be saved as "Excel" spreadsheets (though, really, you can open these up with far more - Numbers, Google Docs, LibreOffice and OpenOffice, and so on).
  • You can choose:
  • How many (maximum) sightings you want per species in the report
  • Whether to include the scientific name?
  • Whether to include family names?
  • Whether to show threatened status?
  • Whether to include sighting notes?
  • And HTML printouts can also be customized in much the same way.
  • BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE:
  • Every time you enter a sighting in Enter sightings, Scythebill will tell you if that species is new for your world list, country list, state list, or county list! (And it'll also warn you if it's not on the checklist for that location.)
  • SMALL STUFF:
  • Scythebill will now warn you if you haven't saved your reports in awhile. (Thanks to Yann M. for the idea).
  • IOC mappings for Chinese Wren-Babbler (a split off Scaly-breasted) were missing; that's now fixed.
  • The MacOS Lion version was missing little right-facing arrows in a few screens.
  • When you selected a sighting in Browse by location, the species name wasn't always present in the sighting editor. It now is. (Thanks to Yann M. for the report.)
  • Scythebill imports with the Clements taxonomy would sometimes drop subspecies in favor of groups. (Thanks to Jochen B. for the excellent catch.)

New in Scythebill 2013 9.2.1 (Jul 1, 2013)

  • New icon and splash screen! It's of an actual Red-billed Scythebill, and is far higher quality than that old Yellow Cardinal shot of mine. The Mac OS X and Windows icons now also scale much better.
  • IOC 3.4 - just released, already supported.
  • A lot more ways to edit. Most notably, you can now edit right from "Show reports". Issue any report you want, select a sighting, and you can edit that sighting. Or, even better: you can generate a report, and click the new "Bulk edit..." button, which will let you edit all matched sightings at once. You can also edit dates (one-by-one, or in bulk) everywhere.
  • New data fields and report generation options:
  • Two data fields have been added.
  • First, you can set an "Adult" checkbox for sightings that aren't specifically male or female, but are definitely not immatures.
  • More interestingly - and hopefully in time for a few sightings this summer - is the addition of Breeding Bird Codes. Scythebill supports the full set of eBird breeding bird codes, and you can issue reports against breeding bird categories (e.g. "Confirmed" breeding).
  • Also, you can now issue reports against the Description field - if you're trying to find that raptor sighting where a Red-shouldered Blackbird was dive-bombing it, it's now much easier to track it down quickly.
  • Smaller features:
  • There's also a new View menu to change font sizes, so if you've got a huge monitor you can expand the font size to be easier on the eyes. And if you've got a small monitor, you can shrink the font size down. (Large fonts and small monitors may not work well together.)
  • There's some smaller things too:
  • You can now enter Italian Sparrow on the IOC list (should've been able to even in IOC 3.3). Thanks to Peter W. for the report.
  • eBird import now supports importing single-day checklists. Thanks to user "righttoreason" for the report.
  • Drag-and-drop of locations in "Browse by locations" (for re-arranging) now works better. When you hover over a collapsed location, it'll automatically expand. And you properly get feedback on MacOS as you drag over other items.
  • Total sighting counts in HTML reports and printouts were missing "sp." sightings.
  • Scythebill fonts won't be fuzzy on MacOS displays that are "Retina" capable.

New in Scythebill 9.2.0 (Apr 27, 2013)

  • Full IOC subspecies support (almost)
  • Bulk editing
  • Browse by location improvements
  • Easier "Sp." resolution
  • Smaller fixes

New in Scythebill 9.1.0 (Mar 4, 2013)

  • Added import support and alternate name entry.

New in Scythebill 9.0.4 (Jan 29, 2013)

  • Upgraded the just-released IOC 3.3 taxonomy.

New in Scythebill 9.0.3 (Jan 22, 2013)

  • Scythebill supports entering "sp." sightings and hybrids.
  • Now supports the International Ornithologists’ Union checklist (version 3.2).
  • An "Export..." menu option to get all your data out of Scythebill into one flat file.
  • "Report an issue" and "Open containing" folder menu items
  • "Town" and "park" location types
  • Fixes for window sizing on Windows operating systems
  • A number of performance improvements

New in Scythebill 9.0.1 (Jan 4, 2013)

  • Supports entering "sp." sightings and hybrids.
  • Supports the International Ornithologists’ Union checklist (version 3.2).

New in Scythebill 0.8.6 (Oct 2, 2012)

  • Scythebill 0.8.6 includes the Clements 6.7 September 2012 update.

New in Scythebill 0.8.5 Beta 2 (Aug 27, 2012)

  • New features:
  • A new "Print" option simplifies printing reports.
  • An "ID Uncertain" status for sightings (which won't be counted or exported to EBird, but can be kept for record keeping)
  • Bug fixes:
  • Some display fixes when odd dates (like those missing a year, but including a month)
  • Scythebill sometimes lost focus (especially on MacOS) as you switched screens

New in Scythebill 0.8.5 Beta (Aug 6, 2012)

  • New features:
  • The location entry UI has been overhauled. Most importantly, it should be less baffling. Also, when entering sightings, it is now possible to enter a new location with multiple parents (e.g, a new location in a new city in a new state).
  • Scythebill now includes the IUCN Red List status of all species. Endangered (and worse) status shows inline when browsing, and you can query on status (e.g. "Vulnerable or worse").
  • Scythebill will tell you when a new version is available for download.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Family totals (number of species seen out of the family totals) now show more consistently in the "Show Reports" UI.
  • (MacOS only) When dragging around locations in the Browse by Location UI, highlighting appears correctly.

New in Scythebill 0.8.4 (Jul 31, 2012)

  • New features:
  • Added a "Photographed" checkbox (which you can issue reports on)
  • Reports now show total counts with groups and subspecies when requested.
  • HTML exports include total sighting counts
  • MacOS UI now looks far better on Lion (thanks to Quaqua 8.0)
  • Removed Birdstack support from Scythebill
  • "Show reports" now starts with a "Location" rule
  • A few small tweaks to ranges and alternate names
  • Bug fixes:
  • "Lifers" show in bold when first entered; however, if you'd seen a subspecies (e.g. "Light-footed" Clapper Rail), then entered a sighting of the overall species (Clapper Rail), it incorrectly showed as bold.
  • A couple of exceptions (which led to warning alerts) fixed

New in Scythebill 0.8.2 (Jul 18, 2011)

  • A few bug fixes, and inclusion of the Feb 2011 Clements checklist errata.