Mitch s Amazing Journal Journey Part 1

Transcription

1 Mitch s Amazing Journal Journey Revision 2 Tuesday, August 21, 2012 Mitch s Amazing Journal Journey Part 1 Introduction to the Ultimate Birder s Life List and Diary Synopsis: This is a must read document that explains the design philosophy behind ibird Journal as well as teaches the most important features. Reading this will profoundly maximize the value of Journal. So, What Is ibird Journal? At the most basic level ibird Journal is an app for keeping track of birds you have seen. But it s actually much more than that. It s a polished program for saving Mitchell Waite Page 1 of 28 ibird Journal

2 highly detailed information about all the bird species you ve observed, including things like their exact GPS location, the date, time, weather, habitat and the distance you covered in your birding journey and much more. ibird Journal is the perfect tool for doing bird counts which are events where large numbers of people work together to come up with the number of bird species in a certain geographic area at a certain time of the year. ibird Journal not only lets you save information about birds, it does it in an extremely efficient manner by storing it in a database so that you can analyze the information later using a kind of reporting system. Besides capturing dozens of things about the bird you observed such as its species type, sex, age and parameters you may never heard of before, like protocol. Journal also lets you create checklists of birds you would like to see and then sort them by what you have and haven t observed. Journal also displays all the birds you have recorded on a map of the world. It lets you filter the dates you saw these species. Oh, and it s also a diary for saving your thoughts and ideas about birds. Now while there are apps on the market that try to accomplish these kinds of functions we believe they don t do a very good job at it. In fact all of the current crop of checklist apps (and programs) have a very steep learning curve and lack an intuitive interface. ibird Journal not only makes saving your observations easy it also makes saving the information really fun. This is because ibird Journal can be opened from any of our ibird Guide to Birds apps. These field guide apps are designed to help you identify birds like an expert. The ibird series of field guide apps have a search engine that helps you find any bird you are looking for. Once you have identified the bird using its search engine you can simply press a Journal button. It will open ibird Journal with an observation form filled out with your GPS location, the date and time and so on. You can save the observation and then return to ibird Pro with one tap. How cool is that? This is just some of what ibird Journal offers. The following sections of Part 1 of Mitch s Amazing Journal Journey will take you on an adventure of a lot of what ibird Journal can do. But before we start lets a get a few basics out of the way. Mitchell Waite Page 2 of 28 ibird Journal

3 Lists, Checklists, Life Lists and Diaries For birders a List is simply a collection of bird observations. A List is used whenever you want to capture and save details about a group of birds you have observed in the field. Each observation in the list stores the bird's name, where you saw it (Location), the date and time, how many of this bird you have seen (its count) and much more. In ibird Journal you usually name a List to help remind you of the observations seen at a particular location or made during a specific date and time or used for a specific event. For example you might have a list of birds you have seen in your backyard and call this your Backyard List. Or you might have a list of birds you saw when you went birding in Miami called your Florida Vacation List. Each observation in a List has its own parameters and none of these depend on any of the birds you have previously put in the List. They are just "grouped" together under a single name. A Checklist is similar to a List but is normally produced ahead of time by adding bird species you hope to see. As you find any of these birds you check the bird on the checklist as observed. Checklists allow you to save your bird observations faster than Lists because you don t have to spend much time searching for the species; e.g. it s already on the list. You are simply changing the species observation state from not seen to seen. Checklists are very powerful and we will have much more to say about them in Part 2. A Life List is simply a collection of all the observations you have seen in your life. In ibird Journal it's all the observations in your Lists and all the "seen" observations in your Checklists. Not all birders have a Life List but to those that do it s usually the most important list they own. To many it contains the story of their life of birding. I have seen Life Lists made up of hundred s of notebooks. A birding Diary is a log of things you have written and saved about your birding experiences. A diary can contain more than just words, it might have photos, and drawings even things you found and pressed into pages like feathers or flowers. A diary can be saved in any kind of format, but most often they are chronological meaning organized by date. In the Beginning Before there were computers, birders could only use paper and pen or pencil to keep track of the bird species they observed. Birders used field guide books to Mitchell Waite Page 3 of 28 ibird Journal

4 identify the bird and then wrote down all the details about it usually in a notepad. Sometimes sketches of the birds were made or photos taken. When Personal Computers arrived on the scene some of the more tech- savvy birders began using word processors and spreadsheets to organize the sightings they made in the field. With the advent of the pocket computer called the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), such as the Palm Pilot and then smartphones and tablet computers, bird observations took a big leap forward because sightings could be made in the field right on device. Smartphones and Field Guides Before the listing apps appeared developers created another kind of app to replace paper book- based field guides. They turned smartphones into digital field guides to birds. A typical field guide app, such as our own ibird Pro Guide to Birds, has illustrations and photos of the birds of North America, recordings of their songs and a search engine to help you identify them. These apps have had a huge positive affect on birding by introducing the hobby of birding to wider numbers of people. The fact that birders can use smartphones for keeping observations naturally led to the integration of listing apps with these birding apps. Listing Apps Today As these devices grew in capability and functionality, developers added checklist features to the field guide apps. Finally these developers began to create checklist apps that were specifically designed for birders who kept lists. The most popular of these apps today are found on the Apple iphone and ipad but you can also find a few on Android devices from Google and Amazon. These apps go by various names such a listing apps, bird observation apps or bird checklist apps. With this brief introduction you know enough to dive into the nuts and bolts of ibird Journal and find out how easy and fun it is to use. Mitchell Waite Page 4 of 28 ibird Journal

5 Anatomy of ibird Journal Before we go too far let s first go over the basic features and definitions of the main parts of the ibird Journal app. We ll start with the opening page (what appears after the splash screen). This is the List screen. It's also accessed by tapping the List icon in the tab bar at the bottom of the app. The List screen is made up of lists of bird species created you have created with the app. In the above screen three lists are shown. The All Lists automatically stores every observation you have ever created. Think of it as a kind of giant master list. The Mitchell Waite Page 5 of 28 ibird Journal

6 Default List is where observations go if you don t specify a List. The Mt. Tam Hike List is a custom list I created for this tutorial. The Tab Bar Icons At the bottom of Journal s List screen is a set of five tab icons. Here is what each is for. Lists. Starting on the left the List icon is used to access the page that contains the Observation Lists, which we are looking at now. Note that the icon shows each bird inside of a separate document. This is to help you remember that this kind of Observation List is made up of multiple independent observations. The parameters of observation stored in the List type of list are created one at a time and may or may not have anything in common. Each observation could be at a different location, at a different date, and so on. Checklists. The second icon from the left is for accessing the Checklist page. This page contains a collection of what we refer to as Checklist type lists, which are different than regular Lists. A Checklist type of list contains multiple bird species that all share some common elements. Remember we mentioned these checklists are created ahead of time. When you add a collection of species to a checklist they all start out sharing the same parameters, such as the date, the location and any others that are specified. This is why the icon shows a single document with a number of birds inside it; to help you remember these bird observations share common elements. later. Locations. The third icon from the left is for accessing the Location screen. This is where you can create new places where you saw your bird, edit existing locations and so on. We ll be seeing more about this feature Settings. The Settings icon, the fourth icon from the left, is for accessing the backup and restore of Journal data to a free cloud service called Dropbox. It is also where you can export or import your Observations to a service called ebird. Will explain more about ebird later. More. The very last tab icon is called More and it s for accessing five additional features on the More screen. At the top of the More screen you can find the following information: Mitchell Waite Page 6 of 28 ibird Journal

7 What s on the More Screen The Version and Build numbers for your app, such as ibird Journal Version 1.0, Build (yep that is right, this number means 104 builds so far for this version). A large Launch ibird button for opening and running ibird directly from Journal (there is a similar button in ibird called Journal). A Mitch s Journal Journey menu to open this tutorial on our server (we constantly update our tutorials that s why we keep them on our server). For those of you who hate reading, a Learning Journal Videos menu to open YouTube movies which teach you how to use the Journal An About ibird Journal menu, which explains how and why Journal was created along with a list credits. An ibird Journal Forum menu to jump to a forum where you can share with other users. A Registration menu which lets you register ibird Journal so we can send you our newsletter and keep you informed of updates. Now that you understand the basic functionality of the List screen lets get into the nitty- gritty of adding observations. What is an Observation? Since Lists are made up of observations it makes sense to first learn what an observation is. An observation of a bird consists of a minimum of the following four pieces of information: What s an Observation The common or Latin name of the species you observed. The exact Location where you saw the species. The date and time you saw the species. A count of how many of these species you have seen. With an app like ibird Journal running on an iphone or ipad the GPS feature can be used to determine your location (most of the time more on this later). The iphone can also insert the date and time of the observation since it keeps track of that in an internal calendar/clock. And while an iphone is really brainy it still can t yet figure out the species of bird you saw, so that burden falls to you (this is the fun Mitchell Waite Page 7 of 28 ibird Journal

8 part of birding anyway.) If you have a field guide app such as ibird it can help you determine the bird you saw by using its search engine. Lists vs. Checklists An important concept to understand before we get too far into using ibird Journal is the difference between Lists and Checklists. There is some controversy among the birding cognoscenti about how lists are organized. We touched on the differences in the beginning but I want to help you understand the subtleties in more depth. We didn t invent Lists and Checklists; they have been around probably since people began watching birds. However birders haven t always used these terms to define them. And we have added our own spin to Checklists, which we think you ll like once you have grokked what we have done. A List in ibird works like most people would expect: a collection of sightings of birds. You can give the List any name you want. A Checklist in ibird is more complicated than a List but not overly so: basically a Checklist is a List prepopulated with birds you want to see. To make an observation you just check off the birds you see. It s that simple. Both Lists and Checklists are used in a very similar manner. However at a deeper level a Checklist is more than a List that has been prepopulated with bird species. What makes a Checklist so special in ibird Journal is a concept called inheritance. We are not going to try and explain inheritance right now, but when we do you are either going to love it or hate it and we think it will be the later. Mitchell Waite Page 8 of 28 ibird Journal

9 The Observation List Once we have the four pieces of information (species, location, date and time, and count) we are ready to fill out the observation form and save it. However there are a few terms and concepts you should know before we do this. When we first tap a List in Journal, such as our custom Mt. Tam Hike list, it reveals all the species that are in it, as shown below. Mitchell Waite Page 9 of 28 ibird Journal

10 This Observation List screen shows all the species contained in the list. Don t let all the buttons scare you; they are simply there to make it easy to view these lists in several different ways as shown in the figure. We can divide this screen into three sections. 1. Top Button Area. At the top of the screen are three important buttons. The Back Button. The leftmost button is the Back button and it s for returning to the main List screen. The Date Range Button. The middle button is for sorting the List of species by a date range. This lets you take a list that may cover a range of dates and display the species you saw over a certain set of days or months. The Famous New Button. The most important button is the blue New on the right which is for adding a new observation to the list which we will do in a moment. 2. Middle List Name and Date Range Area. The row below the top set of buttons displays information about the list in gold letters. The List Name and Total Observations. In the first gold text row on the left you see the name of the list (Mt. Tam Hike) and on the right you see total number of observations in the list (6). The Date Range in use. On the second gold text row displayed on the left is the Date Range, which shows the set of dates for this list if you used the Date Range button. Mitchell Waite Page 10 of 28 ibird Journal

11 The Number of Observations for the Date Range. On the second gold text row on the right you see the number of observations for the date range. In this case we have not used the Date Range so the number of observations is the same as the total number of observations. 3. Bottom Button Area. At the bottom of the Observation List screen are buttons for controlling the way your sightings are displayed. The Map/List View Button. The first button switches the list to a map view, which shows all your observation as a set of pins. The screen below shows two maps views, the default and the hybrid. The Species or Date View Button. This button allows you to switch the view between species and date. When you switch to the Species view you have three buttons for sorting the species by first name, last name or a taxonomic (evolutionary) view. The Old First or New First Button. This button allows you to sort the dates by the oldest or newest first. The Icon/Thumbnail/Compact View Button. This button allows you to view the list in a compact text only view, the default icon view (shown) or in a larger thumbnail view. Mitchell Waite Page 11 of 28 ibird Journal

12 The default list is displayed in the Date mode, with the date range disabled so all dates are shown, sorted by the Newest observation date at the top with all the observations displayed in the Icon view. In our Mt. Tam Hike list the species are grouped by the dates they where observed. So for example we see two species at the top that were seen on the same day. Mitchell Waite Page 12 of 28 ibird Journal

13 Creating a New Observation With these preliminaries out of the way you are ready to add your first observation to the list. We ll assume you are on Mt. Tamalpais hike with us and we see a particular bird we want to add to this list of 6 birds. First tap the New button on the Observation List. This will open a New Observation form as show below. Mitchell Waite Page 13 of 28 ibird Journal

14 As you can see above there are four basic pieces of data you need to select: 1. The species of bird you saw 2. The number of these birds you saw (the count) 3. The location where you saw this bird 4. The date and time you saw this bird Define the Species Tap to Undefined Species button see the three choices for selecting a species. Note if the species is not in the ibird database use the Custom Species button (2). Mitchell Waite Page 14 of 28 ibird Journal

15 1 Select From Species List. When you know the name of the species you want to add to your observation tap the first button on the menu called Select From Species List. When tapped this will open a scrolling list of all the birds in North America, which are defined in the ibird database (this is the small screen labeled 1 on the left in the above figure). There are four ways to select a species from this list: Mitchell Waite Page 15 of 28 ibird Journal

16 Four Ways to Select a Species Scroll through the list or to jump to a specific letter on the list by tapping a letter of the vertical index of alphabetical letters A Z on the right. Type part of a species common name in the search field at the top, e.g. Rough will list the Rough- legged Hawk and the Northern Rough- winged Swallow. Type a 4- character band code proceeded by the ampersand & in the search field, e.g. typing &RLHA will select the Rough- legged Hawk. Band codes are useful shorthand for counting birds. Type the Latin name proceeded by the slash / character in the search field. For example if you think you saw the Rough- legged Hawk you can tap the R on the screen to jump to birds whose name starts with the letter R, type the name rough or hawk in the search field, type an ampersand into the text field followed by the birds band code, e.g. &RLHA or type a slash into the text field followed by the bird s Latin name, e.g. /buteo lagopus. 2 Custom Species. The second button on the menu is Custom Species. Use this selection when the species you want to add to your list is not in the ibird database. This might be the case if you are selecting a special race or subspecies that we have not yet added to ibird or if you are adding a bird that is outside North America. 3 Select Using Search. The third button on the menu is Select Using Search. This enables a scaled down version of the search engine found in our ibird Guide to Birds apps. If you are familiar with this search then you know it is extremely useful for narrowing down a large list of birds to just a few based on a few attributes you have remembered. In the case of Journal we have included four of the most used attributes for searching: Location, Shape Color Prominent and Backyard Feeder. (If you want a more sophisticated search engine check our ibird Pro app that has 38 different attributes.) Since we have seen a Hawk in California and see that is brown and white we selected those parameters in the example. As you can see even with this little information ibird has narrowed it down to one of four species and shows this with the words 4 birds matched at the top of the screen. Press the View button to see that it has picked Bald Eagle, Osprey, Prairie Falcon and Rough- legged Hawk. Mitchell Waite Page 16 of 28 ibird Journal

17 Once you select the Rough- legged Hawk it will return you to the previous screen replacing the Undefined Species and including the information about this bird. Mitchell Waite Page 17 of 28 ibird Journal

18 The Disclosure Button. You may not have known this blue button has a name. It s called the Disclosure button because when tapped it discloses more information. Do you know what to call the plain gray version of this button? To see if this is the correct species you can get more information about it by pressing on the blue disclosure button on the right side the species tile. Below you can see the result of the tapping the disclosure button shows the Rough- legged Hawk species account including illustration, a paragraph describing the species and a range map of its migration and breeding areas. Mitchell Waite Page 18 of 28 ibird Journal

19 Select the Location Now that we have selected our species we are almost ready to save the observation. However there is still one very important piece of information we need to add and that is the Location. Begin by tapping the Location button on the main form you are filling out. This will bring up the Location screen as shown in the figure below. There are several important buttons to understand on this screen. Back. The Back button returns to the previous form. The Red Cardinal Pin. Drag the red cardinal pin to move the location on the map to a new place. Wait a few seconds for the device to find the name of the place. In our example the map called our location Dispea Trail Stinson Beach. Previous Location button. This button is used when you have already created a location and want to reuse it. It will list all the locations you have seen before. It s a good idea to reuse preexisting locations in observations of species are seen at the same spot. Reason is when you do a search for all birds seen at a particular location the results will be more useful than if you used several Locations that all point to the same spot. Location button. The white circle button on the lower left of the Location screen is called the Location button. Its purpose is to use the GPS built into your device to find your location and display it on the map. For this to show the actual name of a place you need your device to be connected to the Internet. You also need to be outdoors so the device can access the satellites. Mitchell Waite Page 19 of 28 ibird Journal

20 Note that the place name feature will ONLY work if you have an Internet connection. It can be either via a cellular or WiFi mode. The cellular connection will give a more accurate result than the WiFi mode. When you press the Location button the device first attempts to find your location s GPS coordinates. GPS stands for Global Positioning Satellite and are describe as the Latitude and Longitude of your location. First the device will display a small blue globe surrounded by a blue circle. Next it will display a small red cardinal on the shaft of a pin, which is the custom pin we use for ibird Journal. Above the pin Journal will display a gray Mitchell Waite Page 20 of 28 ibird Journal

21 rectangular box with Latitude and Longitude numbers and underneath that the words Finding address. You can drag the red cardinal pin with your finger to move it to a different location. Once Journal has determined your actual location name it will replace the GPS values and you are ready to go to the next step. Note. If you are using an Apple iphone, ipod touch or ipad that does not have a GPS chip or you are not connected to the Internet the map will be unable to find an address. If you have a GPS chip but are not connected to the Internet the map will just show the two numbers that make up your GPS address. This GPS address can be saved in the next step so that when you return home you can open it again and let the map give the location the correct name. If you do not have a GPS chip and are not connected to the Internet you can still name the location by using the Skip button. Next button. Once the name of your location has been determined, or even if the device can t find your location and give it a name, press the blue Next button. Pressing Next opens the Location Name screen where you can: 1. Save the name of the location that the map created 2. Create a name if no named location was found 3. Create a friendlier name for the found location. Once you have accepted the name or created a name tap the blue Save button in the upper right. This will return you to the original observation form. Mitchell Waite Page 21 of 28 ibird Journal

22 Count and Bird Counts Now that you have selected a species and created a Location you have finished two of the four important parts of an observation. The third item you can change is the count which is answers the question how many of the species you have seen. Mitchell Waite Page 22 of 28 ibird Journal

23 Internal Trivia. You can skip this if you like but it s a small piece of insider information. We spent a good deal of time debating how to set up the count and if you ve never participated in a bird count you probably won t know why. Bird counts are when groups of people get together and attempt to count the number of species that appear at a certain time of year, in a certain location, etc. Basic bird counts are a good way to estimate the approximate size of a population, determine changes in that population and sometimes to see if there are changes due to the environment. There are many well known counts such as the Great Backyard Bird Count where people count birds in their backyard and submit the results (this is called Citizen Science), the Christmas Bird Count that Audubon puts on every year from mid December to mid January, and so on. Mitchell Waite Page 23 of 28 ibird Journal

24 When people are doing a bird count they usually use pen and paper and write as fast as they can where they are, and how many of what birds they see. Or they might use a tape recorder to capture them speaking this information out loud, which they can transcribe later. The real advanced birders have memorized the four character band codes for species so they can write down a count and a species super quick. But now with devices like smartphones they can use the power of apps like ibird Journal to help them do their counts. Knowing that birder s needed to enter the information about an observation quickly posed some challenges. They must be able to a) identify the bird really fast, b) enter the number of the birds they see really fast, and identify physically where they are, also quickly. So everything we did when designing ibird Journal we asked the question is this faster than using paper and pen? For the count we had to make it really easy to enter a number quickly. So when we designed Journal we made decided to make our count entry via a large + and a large button. To further speed things up if there is only one species you don t have to do anything because we set the default count to 1. If there are more than one of the species you tap the + button as many times s there are birds of that species. If you goof up and go over the count you can hit the - button to decrement the count. And if the number of species is a large number you can tap the disclosure button and just enter a value with the numeric keyboard as shown below. We have another way to enter the count that is even cooler that using buttons. We ll be revealing what that is in an update to ibird Journal. Mitchell Waite Page 24 of 28 ibird Journal

25 Date and Time Now that count has been entered there is just one final thing to do, which is set the date and time. ibird Journal uses the built in iphone calendar and clock to set the date and time when you first create a blank New observation. So unless you need to change it there is no reason to get into this feature. If you do want to change it the controls are the standard ones you have used before to set the date and calendar so we won t bother reviewing them here. Save or Save and New Whew, finally after 20 pages, we are ready to save our observation. It may seem like a lot but when you look back you may think you haven t done all that much. Mitchell Waite Page 25 of 28 ibird Journal

26 But you really have learned a lot about what a bird observation is all about; you have learned concepts and definitions to a number of new concepts of listers. Now all that is left is saving your sightings. There are two ways you can save in ibird Journal. If you are done with this bird and don t plan on adding another soon you can save this observation and do nothing more by just tapping the Save button. That will take you back to the familiar Observation screen. You should see the list of species in your List increased by one due to this new observation as shown below. We see the Rough- legged Hawk has been added and it shows the count of 1 along with the date and time we saw it. Our observations have gone from 6 to 7. Mitchell Waite Page 26 of 28 ibird Journal

27 But suppose you want to keep birding and add another species? You can do this by tapping the Save and New button (I know you are thinking wow those guys thought of everything. ). After tapping Save and New you ll get the familiar blank form again, but this time it remembers your location and enters the most recent time, as you can see below. All you need to do now is pick a new species and count and you can keep repeating the process over and over. And at any time you can change the location. Conclusion We have reached the end of this first part of Mitch s Amazing Journal Journey. We hope you are excited about beginning your listing adventures. If this is as far as you Mitchell Waite Page 27 of 28 ibird Journal

28 read you will be able to get a lot of enjoyment out of the app. However there are several additional features we think you would get a lot out of and for that reason we would like to advise you to dive into the Part 2. Mitchell Waite Page 28 of 28 ibird Journal