Scythebill Changelog

What's new in Scythebill 16.2.1

Feb 13, 2024

New for an observer:
If you've enabled multiple observers, Scythebill will now tell you if that sighting is a lifer for just one of the observers. You'll still see "World" if it's new for all of the observers, but if it's just new for one or more of them, their abbreviation or abbreviations will appear.
Another way to create trip reports:
You can now select multiple "visits" in Browse by location and create a trip report from those visits.
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. (A fix in 16.2.1: this feature now works if you drop pictures directly onto the camera icon.)
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.
An error that some users saw when changing observers should be fixed.
Birder's Diary imports now are more tolerant of files using different encodings. (I think this will fix issues when using the latest version of Birder's Diary, but I also expect that most users will get better results asking Birder's Diary to create a file for eBird, then importing to Scythebill with that.)

New in Scythebill 16.2.0 (Jan 14, 2024)

New in Scythebill 16.1.0 (Dec 24, 2023)

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:
Mammal Watching taxonomy for the ABA region:
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)

Scythebill 15.9 is now available! Its main feature is the new IOC 13.1 taxonomy, but it also includes a number of smaller improvements. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.
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.
If you want to upgrade from one of the older butterfly taxonomies covering just part of the world, it's a few quick steps:
Switch to the older taxonomy.
From "Show reports", use "Export sightings..." and "...to Scythebill CSV".
Switch to the newer taxonomy
From Import, use "Import from Scythebill"
Once you're satisfied with the results, you can delete the old taxonomy altogether (which will delete all your records for the old taxonomy).
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 15.8.1 (Mar 5, 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)

New in Scythebill 15.7.4 (Aug 9, 2022)

New in Scythebill 15.7.3 (Jul 13, 2022)

New in Scythebill 15.7.2 (Jun 20, 2022)

New in Scythebill 15.7.0 (Jun 12, 2022)

New in Scythebill 15.6.0 (Jan 19, 2022)

New in Scythebill 15.4.0 (Aug 30, 2021)

New in Scythebill 15.3.0 (Jul 16, 2021)

New in Scythebill 15.2.4 (Jul 8, 2021)

New in Scythebill 15.2.1 (Apr 27, 2021)

New in Scythebill 15.2.0 (Apr 25, 2021)

Scythebill 15.2 is now available, with many improvements across the application, including BirdTrack support and several browsing and import improvements. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.
Browsing improvements:
Browse by location, has two improvements, both of which you can see in the screenshot below (though you may have to squint). First, you can now select a single visit and immediately see the list of species from that visit - this is a November 23, 2006 visit of mine to Iberá Marshes in Argentina:
Previously, you could only see the visit data when you selected a single visit (things like visit comments, the eBird observation type, etc.). That's still accessible, with one more click - select "Visit data..." - but now you can see all the species observed (and edit them) immediately.
You can also see an "Only visited locations?" checkbox at the top, toward right. Instead of showing all the countries and states/provinces of the world, as was the case in earlier versions, if you select this, you'll only see locations where you've recorded at least one observation. So, I've got just the six countries in South America visible, and you can probably guess that I'd really like to visit Colombia! This option is "sticky" - Scythebill will remember its setting as you leave and come back to this window.
Similarly, Browse by species has a new "Only encountered species?" checkbox, which will hide all the species you've never encountered.
BirdTrack support:
Scythebill now supports importing from and exporting to BirdTrack, a very popular website and mobile application for recording bird sightings in the British Isles and Ireland. As with any other new import format, when it's new, it's likely to have a few rough edges. If you encounter any of them, please let me know!
BirdTrack imports happen in the usual way in Scythebill. From any page, use "Import sightings" in the File menu, and then choose importing from BirdTrack.
To export to BirdTrack, go to Show reports, then in the bottom left select "Export sightings..." and choose "... to BirdTrack".
Other import improvements:
When you get done with an import, you also now get an accounting of what new species you recorded at a site. For example, in this recent trip to a local site, I had 13 species which I hadn't yet recorded from that site, and 40 species that were new for my year list:
If an import gives you world lifers, or new birds for your country, state, or county lists, you'll get that here too. You've always gotten this sort of information when entering sightings directly in Scythebill, but now you get it from imports as well!
As part of adding BirdTrack imports, Scythebill can now look at a lat/long point and identify the country (and sometimes state) without asking Google or eBird. This has been used to make Wildlife Recorder and HBW imports significantly easier - large imports that used to require manually resolving hundreds of locations to a country can now import in one go. You do need to have entered location names in the original application (this is important for Wildlife Recorder users!).
Importing did a poor job of letting you resolve an imported location to one you'd already recorded in some cases. This should would much better in all cases now.
Finally, you can now use import from eBird even when you're not in a bird taxonomy. This never happens for eBird, of course. But BirdJournal can create eBird-style imports for taxa other than birds, and these can now be imported into Scythebill.
Reconcile "sp's" against checklists:
The Scythebill taxonomy upgrade has long let you reconcile splits using its checklists. But up until now, there wasn't any way to redo this process once you left it. You can now, at any time, use a new "Reconcile sp.'s automatically" option in the File menu. You'll get a dialog that tells you what will happen before you click "Yes". Here's the results of me going back in time and grabbing my list as it existed in 2016:
The next time you run a taxonomic upgrade, you'll also get this improved information - instead of just telling you how many sightings will be resolved, it'll tell you what species changes come of it.
You can do this with either the Clements/eBird or IOC taxonomies - it'll run with the current taxonomy in either case.
Small improvements:
Scythebill is now "signed" on Windows. For now, this won't change much - though when Windows gives you warnings about an "unrecognized app", you'll see my name as the publisher. But as people install and use Scythebill, the installation warning will eventually disappear.
When using Enter sightings, the "New for" column will also tell you if you have new species for your "year" list (though only for your world year list - if you're tracking multiple year lists, this doesn't quite do what you need).
The BOU names for the IOC taxonomy are updated for some recent changes, most but not all of which align better with widespread non-British usage (for example, Greater and Lesser Canada Goose are now just Canada and Cackling Goose).
Scythebill automatically uses its checklists to simplify data entry when you're typing abbreviated species names. It now prioritizes regular species over rarities - for example, the first "D" in England is now Dartford Warbler and not Dark-eyed Junco.
There is now a new preference to let you choose the language for Scythebill. If you don't want to use the system language, you can explicitly choose from English, German, or Spanish.
As always, a bevy of recent first records are incorporated into the checklists. The rarity list is fixed for Oregon and British Columbia, and the Armenia checklist is much improved.
Fixed bugs:
When entering sightings, if you quit Scythebill or asked to import sightings before clicking "Done", you'd lose your work! You now get a warning, and you can also use "Save" in the file menu during species entry to immediately save without leaving.
Some of the keyboard shortcuts when entering sightings - like "H" to toggle on Heard Only - would not always get saved
When entering sightings and moving to or from the IOC taxonomy, the table might not correctly display species counts and other information. (The data was always present.)
The IUCN Redlist status for endangered species wouldn't appear in "Browse by species" if the species only had a scientific name. This just affected extended taxonomies.
An error dialog that sometimes appeared on MacOS when plugging in or plugging monitors should no longer appear.

New in Scythebill 15.1.11 (Jan 25, 2021)

New in Scythebill 15.0.3 (Jan 5, 2021)

New in Scythebill 15.0.2 (Jan 3, 2021)

Flickr Album imports:
Scythebill now supports importing sightings from Flickr Albums, providing a great way for photographers to bootstrap their Scythebill databases. It looks for bird names (or mammal names, or any other taxonomy) in the description and title of the photo.
Some recommendations and limitations:
It only supports albums - it can't import an entire photostream, for example.
It only supports public albums - you can't import private data. You can flip the album to public for the import and right back to private if needed.
It will only import the first 500 photos of an album. If you've got really large albums, let me know.
It does a better job if you can give it one location - say, a country - for the import. If you have albums spanning multiple countries, it'll do OK, but for best results use albums organized per-country.
Obviously, photos with no title or description cannot import.
This is a bit new and experimental, and I'm very curious how well it works for all of you Flickr users!
Reporting improvements - "Times sighted" and "Pacific Ocean (ABA)":
You can now generate reports that pick species by how many times they've been sighted. So if you're curious, say, how many birds you've seen in 2020 exactly once, or in California more than 100 times, or anything of that sort, use the new "Times sighted" option in Show reports.
There's also a "Pacific Ocean (ABA)" reporting region you can use. There's a few locations that the ABA considers part of the Pacific Ocean region that Scythebill puts in Australasia - most notably New Zealand, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands. This made Australasian users happy, but meant anyone reporting listing totals to the ABA had their numbers off.
Other import improvements:
Imports using the pre-split name of a now-split bird ("Black-chinned Laughingthrush") won't arbitrarily pick one species from the list, but will correctly generate "spuh" records of all the plausible forms for the location.
Importing from eBird "MyData" files now uses "ML Catalog" entries (Macaulay Library) to automatically link to photos you've uploaded to eBird.
Importing from HBW Alive exports should be much more successful now. In particular, Scythebill should be able to read XSLX files from HBW.
Wings imports have had a few rough edges polished. It gives better error messages when locations are missing from the import files, and avoids mapping custom user modifications to the Wings taxonomy to the wrong bird.
Small new features:
There's a new "Find checklist rarities..." menu item in the File menu. It can find any species you've seen that are considered rarities on the Scythebill checklists. This can just give you a happy memory, but it can also be a sign of identification or import mistakes, or a problem with the Scythebill checklists.
The IUCN Red List 2020 updates are now included.
Scythebill now includes checklists for the five "High Seas" regions. Can't say they're perfect (no one officially tracks these as best I can find), but they should be helpful on the rare occasions one is on a boat far, far from land.
Scythebill includes new eBird/Clements name translations for the Arabic, Azerbaijani, Basque, Gallician, Korean, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovakian, and Slovenian languages.
The Isle of Man, Guernsey, and Jersey are no longer incorrectly included in the United Kingdom. (They are Crown dependencies instead.)
The checklists are, as always, updated - in particular, I did another annual pass comparing all of Scythebill's checklists with eBird records, uncovering a lot of new entries.
Bugs fixed:
The Range Summary dialog used when resolving splits or choosing subspecies now works correctly in multi-monitor setups.
An error dialog that sometimes popped up when switching taxonomies on the Show reports page should be fixed
When entering the second half of a "spuh" or hybrid, alternate names are now available in the species chooser.

New in Scythebill 14.9.0 (Jul 20, 2020)

New in Scythebill 14.8.3 (Apr 12, 2020)

Font changes:
Scythebill now uses a font for Windows and Linux that supports Japanese, Chinese, and Korean characters (as well as some other languages) which were not supported before. There may be some slight visual changes associated with this; let me know if anything seems markedly worse
eBird improvements:
Scythebill now uses the latest eBird breeding bird codes. Most interestingly, "Singing male" is now "Singing bird" - did you know that in most songbird species, females sing too? Also, there's new "Used nest" and "Wren/woodpecker nest building" codes
Scythebill had a bad habit of importing some eBird groups as "spuhs" - when the scientific name of the group listed two subspecies (like "Dark-eyed Junco (Slate-colored) - Junco hyemalis hyemalis/carolinensis"). This is fixed
Scythebill also now gives a much better error message when it gets a "MyEBirdData" import where the dates are formatted strangely. This most often happens when users edit this CSV file in Excel. As a reminder, you can always import an entire MyEBirdData file into Scythebill, and Scythebill will automatically exclude the already-imported sightings
Finally, Scythebill Life List imports were largely failing, starting in 14.8.2
Other improvements:
Scythebill now tries to save window locations when you quit and restart, so if you'd like to keep your windows on one side of your screen or another, Scythebill will try to keep it there
Scythebill, for at least some users, was showing an error screen when dragging images in from Chrome for photos. (You can attach photos from your disk or a website.)
The File menu looks a bit different in this release. Most notably, I've moved and renamed the old "New..." and "Open..." menu items; an occasional user would think that "New..." was the proper way to enter new sightings, which it most definitely is not! ("New..." creates a new sightings file altogether.)
German translations are a bit better, thanks to advice from a native speaker
Observado imports should now support the French language

New in Scythebill 14.8.2 (Feb 23, 2020)

New in Scythebill 14.8.1 (Feb 19, 2020)

New in Scythebill 14.8.0 (Jan 26, 2020)

IOC 10.1 taxonomy:
The IOC 10.1 taxonomy was just released, and is now supported. As always, Scythebill will handle the process of upgrading automatically. And you can visit the "Splits and lumps" special report after upgrading to see how you did!
This taxonomy includes the usual set of splits and lumps. One likely to affect most people is the split of Whimbrel into Eurasian Whimbrel (Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australasia) and Hudsonian Whimbrel (the Americas). There are a fair number of records of vagrants of each form into the range of the other, which will make it harder for Scythebill to automatically choose which half of the split you've seen.
Those who've birded in southeast Asia may also encounter a two-species turn into five-species split - Brown and Striated Prinia are now Himalayan, Deignan, Swinhoe's, Burmese, and Annam Prinias.
Editing improvements:
First, the species table in Enter sightings. has two new columns. One shows the Number (if any), and the other shows the sighting status (Introduced, Escapee, Dead, etc.):
These columns should make it much easier to scan your entered data for important information without tediously expanding each row.
Second, there is now a "Delete all..." button when you've selected a visit in Browse by location. This makes it much faster to clean up improperly entered or duplicate data.
Backups - please turn them on!
Scythebill has long had a feature to back up your data weekly or monthly, but I'd like to see a lot more users turn this on! Over the years, I've had messages from several users who've lost track of their .bsxm files, and while I've been able to help some of them find their data and get back on track, others have lost everything. This is painful to me.
Scythebill 14.8 will nag you to turn on backups if you haven't. If you click "Ask me later", it won't nag you again for a week, and you can also tell Scythebill not to ask ever again. But please do enable backups. Your data is precious; take care of it!
iNaturalist import and export:
Scythebill can now import from and export to iNaturalist, a widely-used website supporting observations across the entire "tree of life".
To import from iNaturalist, visit https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/export. Choose a query - probably setting User to your iNaturalist user ID, and choosing a single group of taxa with "Show only", then "Create export". The imports will automatically link Scythebill to any photos you uploaded on iNaturalist.
To export from Scythebill to iNaturalist, go to Show reports, create a report with the sightings you want, then use Export... (at the bottom left) and ...to iNaturalist. This will give you a CSV file. Visit https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/import, click Import from CSV, then choose the CSV file you just created. Note that these imports do not include any photos you have; you'll have to upload those manually if needed.
Other import improvements:
A long-standing bug is fixed; Scythebill imported four "sp." imports to incorrect species.
Sitta sp. was imported as Sulphur-billed Nuthatch!
Pionus sp. was imported as Scaly-headed Parrot!
Dicaeum sp. was imported as Fire-breasted Flowerpecker!
Rhipidura sp. was imported as Mindanao Blue-Fantail!
The underlying cause is a bit embarrassing - it was code in Scythebill that was attempting to gracefully handle small typos interacting poorly with a few very particular three-letter subspecies names. There's multiple layers of protection against this happening again.
eBird imports in general no longer ask you to import "sp." entries (e.g "Gull sp."), since these are not supported by Scythebill. The eBird importer is also more successful at dealing with "eBird" files as generated by Wildlife Recorder.
Wings imports should be successful much more often.
Across all imports (and particularly important for imports of custom data), Scythebill's better at supporting country and state/province abbreviations in place of full names.
Other changes:
Scythebill has fully incorporated the 2019 IUCN Red List updates.
For users with multiple observers, Scythebill 14.7.4 added an Observer field at the top of the window. A bug with Observer fields and "Lifers"/"Species you've seen" in Browse by location has been fixed.
Some reports with a Sighting Status field would fail; this is fixed.
Report spreadsheets used to replace the sighting status ("introduced") with "heard only" for such sightings. That won't happen anymore: heard only will either be appended, or put in its own column (when "Show notes" is enabled).
The folder you use for exports and imports and reports is now tracked separately from the folder for your .bsxm file.
For MacOS users, Scythebill is now fully "notarized" for MacOS Catalina.
As always, there's the usual set of checklist updates. Most notably, I think, I'd had omitted Square-tailed Drongo-Cuckoo from the Bhutan checklist - while Fork-tailed Drongo-Cuckoo does appear to be present too, Square-tailed Drongo-Cuckoo seems the far more commonly reported species.

New in Scythebill 14.7.4 (Oct 27, 2019)

New in Scythebill 14.7.2 (Oct 13, 2019)

New in Scythebill 14.7.1 (Aug 29, 2019)

New in Scythebill 14.7.0 (Aug 18, 2019)

This taxonomy was released two days ago, and it's a big one with more than 80 splits (some of them into as many as six ways, and 12 lumps. Do you love White-eyes? If you do, you'll love this update! (If you've been using the IOC taxonomy, many of these will be old news to you - but it's excellent that these two taxonomies are now a fair bit closer.)
If you're interested in knowing more about what happened, I strongly recommend the (inherently lengthy) overview on the eBird website, especially if you need guidance with some of the more complicated changes (again, White-eyes!).
As always, Scythebill will work hard to automate as much of the update as possible. And when you've updated, visit Special reports, then Splits and lumps, to see just what happened. (I got 17 armchair ticks, and lost one.)
German translation, and more Spanish translations
Scythebill is now available with a translation into German! As is still the case with the Spanish translation, I need all the help I can get cleaning it up to use proper German. If you speak German, and see anything off, please let me know.
Also, the Spanish translation is now more complete - in particular, there's translations for all the continent and country names, and a few pieces of text I'd missed in my previous efforts.
Continent and region checklists
Scythebill finally supports automatic checklists for each of its built-in regions (North America, West Indies, Pacific Ocean, Europe, etc.). This means you can finally get answers to things like "what West Indies endemics have I seen? which haven't I seen?". These checklists work with the Family report too.
As a critical part of this, Scythebill now has separate checklists for European and Asian Russia, and Asian and Australasian Indonesia.
Country and state "tick" maps
The "Total ticks" special report has a new trick: you can see color-coded maps of countries or states of the world, and how much you've seen in each place. Just visit Special reports, then Total ticks, and click the new Total ticks map button. Here's a country map (you can use a small menu at the upper-left to zoom in on various regions):
It's pretty clear that I need to spend a lot more time in Africa and Asia!
And if you switch from "Country" to "State" total ticks, and click that Total ticks map button again, you can look at your total ticks at the state level (switching between countries with that menu in the upper-left). Here's Brazil:
I'd really love to visit Paraná or Rio Grande do Sul!
Total tick maps are not supported for county ticks, unfortunately. (They also don't show up for states in a few countries, like Kenya, Indonesia, or the UK).
Trip report improvements
There's a few subtle improvements in Trip Reports.
The itinerary is now much smarter about ordering and merging visits to the same location on consecutive days
The trip report title will now include the year (if all visits were in a single year)
Pasting the species table into a plain-text editor (one that doesn't support fancy styling) will now give you a nicely aligned table (at least with a monospace font like Courier)
"Wings" imports:
Wings was birding software for MacOS (and perhaps Windows too?). It's been defunct for some time, but Scythebill can now import directly from its exports. To prepare the exports from Wings, you'll need to do a series of exports, all in XML format:
All your sightings
... and all seven kinds of locations (from Continent down to Station)
From there, go to Imports in Scythebill, choose Wings imports, and in the file chooser that opens, select all eight XML files that you produced in Wings. (I wish Wings had chosen to support a simpler export format for its locations, but alas it did not!)
Smaller fixes:
Scythebill will try to warn you when you've got the same file open (and are editing it) on two difference machines. This should make it much safer to save Scythebill's .bsxm files in the cloud.
The Windows installer will now recommend that you quit Scythebill before it installs, which was always a good idea.
Macedonia and Swaziland are now listed as North Macedonia and eSwatini, respectively, matching their official names.
A long-standing bug in Browse by location has been fixed: editing a location name (at the bottom of the window) would drop latitude/longitude and location descriptions.
An occasional error message when dragging sightings between taxa has at last been tracked down, and a couple of other sometimes-reported error messages have been cleaned up.
The usual checklist updates have been made. In addition, the 100-or-so most commonly reported "escaped" species from eBird have been added to checklists as escapees, meaning that when you enter those as sightings they'll automatically be considered uncountable.

New in Scythebill 14.6.0 (Jun 24, 2019)

Scythebill 14.6.0 is now available, with the brand-new IOC 9.2 taxonomy, new trip and family reports, favorite photos, and more. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.
IOC 9.2
The IOC 9.2 taxonomy - just released - is now supported. There's some higher-level taxonomic changes, like a few new families, and the usual suite of splits and lumps. As always, Scythebill will handle the process of upgrading automatically. And you can visit the "Splits and lumps" special report after upgrading to see how you did! (I gained five new species.)
Family reports
If you pay attention to recording species families, you'll be pretty interested in this. The "Show reports" screen has a new option in the "Export..." menu at the bottom left - "as a family report". It's pretty simple - you'll get a few options, then a screen with a list of families, how many are possible, and how many you've recorded:
You can display these in three ways:
Taxonomic order: starting from ostriches, continuing through the passerines at the end
Most recorded: ordered based on how many you've recorded (most at the top), secondarily by number of possibilities (starting with fewest possibilities at the top). That screenshot above uses this order.
Greatest fraction: ordered based on what percentage of possibilities you've recorded, secondarily by number of possibilities (starting with the most possibilities at the top). This makes it easy to see all the monotypic families (in two blocks - one with all the recorded monotypic families, another will all the not-yet recorded ones).
The window that opens automatically puts all the text in the clipboard, so you can take all the text and paste - with formatting intact - it into Word, Pages, OpenOffice, or even GMail.
Trip reports
Yet another new option in the "Export..." menu is "as a trip report". This lets you get a quick start on writing a report for an entire trip - pick a report like "Location" is in "Brazil" and "Date" is in "2010", then create the trip report. This feature is early, and I'm extremely interested to hear about whether it's useful for you, and if you have ideas for how to improve it! The report is made to be copied and pasted into an editor so you can format or clean it up.
Trip reports have up to three sections; each is optional:
An itinerary
A species table
A species list
The itinerary shows, day-by-day, where you visited:
(If you enter "start times" for visits, the itinerary is ordered correctly within each day.)
After each first appearance of a location name, there's an abbreviation for that location (which gets used in the species list). If you had comments attached to a visit, they'll be included in this itinerary.
The species table shows a table with one row for every species, and one column for every day. A number shows how many individuals were seen, "X" means seen without any specific number, and "(H)" means heard-only.
Finally, a species list shows all species seen, using the location name abbreviations (if the species was recorded at more than three locations, locations are omitted).
If there's just one sighting, and there's sighting notes, the sighting notes are included.
Lifers will be bolded if you add a "First records (lifers)" ... should be "highlighted" to your report parameters.
The window that opens with the trip report automatically puts all the text in the clipboard, so you can take all the text and paste it - with formatting intact - into Word, Pages, OpenOffice, or even GMail.
"Favorite" photos
Photos now have a star icon next to them - click it to mark the photo as a "favorite".
The "Photographed" reporting option now has two new options:
"has a favorite": includes sightings that have at least one photo marked as a favorite
"has no favorites": includes sightings that don't have any photo marked as a favorite.
Huge thanks to user drewbenn for implementing this feature.
Smaller features and bug fixes
The "AOU" reporting region has been renamed to the "AOS Area North" region (in keeping with the ABA Listing Areas). And Scythebill's added the "AOS Area South" region.
The import code for "my eBird Data" (eBird exports of all of your sighting) had some bugs introduced in 14.5.1 that would result in imports failing. These are fixed.
The combination of photos for a sighting and sighting notes meant that extra blank lines and spaces would get added to the sighting notes every time you saved! Thanks to user drewbenn for drawing attention to this.

New in Scythebill 14.5.1 (Apr 27, 2019)

Spanish translation:
Scythebill (as of 14.5.0) will now display its entire user interface in Spanish if that's your preferred language!
A lot of this comes from automatic online translation. While the technology has improved dramatically in recent years, it's still far, far from a perfect translation. If you speak Spanish, and see any mistakes or areas for improvement in Scythebill's translations, please let me know! Or: Si habla español y ve algún error o área de mejora en las traducciones de Scythebill, ¡hágamelo saber!
Better re-importing of eBird "Download my Data""
Scythebill is now a lot better at letting you re-import the eBird "Download my Data" export, which is pretty useful when you've entered a bunch of new checklists into eBird. You'll get some (hopefully) clearer text about just what's going to happen.
For example, I've been a bit lazy about consistently importing my eBird mobile app outings back into Scythebill. With 14.5.1, I can export all my eBird data, import it, and just click "yes" on this alert to get just my new sightings cleanly imported.
This feature is currently restricted just to eBird "Download my Data", but if any of you have a need to reimport a full set of data from another piece of software, let me know - this can easily be extended to other import types.
Small features:
14.5.1: Reports have two small new rules: you can request sightings where either the Location or Date "is not set".
14.5.1: The species information pane atop Enter Sightings is more consistent and cleaner with how it displays common and scientific names for subspecies.
14.5.0: There's a new "Download updates..." option in the Help menu, as a shortcut for visiting the Scythebill download page. There's also a "Download taxonomies..." button on the "Manage taxonomies" page to open up a browser and download new extended taxonomies.
Bugs fixed:
14.5.1: A long-standing bug could have resulted in losing Visit Data information; to trigger it, you had to start from Browse by location, find a visit, click Edit sightings..., then click "Back".
14.5.1: The Extended Taxonomy CSV format now uses "Taxonomy ID" as the first column header instead of just "ID", because Excel is Very Very Silly.
14.5.1: Every time Scythebill included an IOC taxonomic update, and you had to do any species resolution, Scythebill forced you into viewing your records with the IOC taxonomy, and you had to manually switch back to eBird/Clements if that's what you want. That's fixed.
14.5.1: Remembered reports using a combination of "Never" and "Heard only" showed wrong totals on the main Scythebill page.
14.5.0: Scythebill is once again able to use eBird's APIs to find hotspots.

New in Scythebill 14.4.5 (Mar 4, 2019)

New in Scythebill 14.4.0 (Feb 18, 2019)

New in Scythebill 14.2.1 (Nov 25, 2018)

New in Scythebill 14.2.0 (Nov 23, 2018)

Scythebill 14.2 is now available, with support for importing from Birder's Diary, a new "Year Comparison" report, and a variety of smaller fixes and improvements. As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Google+, Facebook, or by email.
If you're using Windows, and updating from a version earlier than 14.1, you may run into a "Could not create the Java virtual machine" error after updating. If so, please re-run the installer as an administrator (by right-clicking on the installer .exe file). (And if that doesn't work, please get in touch with me.)
Import improvements:
Scythebill 14.2 adds support for importing from Birder's Diary native CSV exports, which should be far easier than using Birder's Diary's eBird exports as an intermediate step. If you have Birder's Diary (I do not), and give this a try, please let me know how it goes!
With that addition, the "one big button for each type of import" has gotten too big, and the UI will now have a few types up top with a drop-down menu for all the other types. Scythebill will remember which types of imports you use and add buttons for those, so you'll have an easier time seeing only the imports you care about.
Also, imports will now automatically detect if one of Scythebill's many internationalized name sets (42 options for eBird/Clements, 26 for IOC) would be a better fit for the import. For example, if your import contains "White Heron", Scythebill might automatically suggest switching to the "English (New Zealand)" - what's known as "Great Egret" in much of the world is called "White Heron" there.
Also:
eBird checklists with location names containing non-English characters should import better.
Scythebill will do a better job of preventing duplicates when importing against the IOC taxonomy.
BirdBase imports that put records in the United States but without a state were getting added to United States (West Indies) instead of United States (North America). This is fixed.
BirdBase and Avisys imports for Quebec and the Netherlands Antilles weren't being handled correctly.
BirdBase imports no longer (typically) add "BirdBase Region" and "BirdBase Local" locations.
Year comparison reports:
Scythebill's "Special reports" page has a new option - "Year comparisons". These reports let you look at how things have changed year-by-year at a location, so you can see:
How many species you've recorded, in total, year by year
Which species you've recorded (or missed) in each year
First and last recorded dates within each year (and overall) for each species
Frequency of observations
Excluding "undescribed species":
Scythebill includes 44 undescribed species - ones that do not yet have a scientific name. If you're reporting species totals to the ABA, you may not want to include these. Towards that end, the "Preferences" page now has an option to disable "Count undescribed species". A small feature, but if you're a stickler for rules, a useful one!
Smaller changes:
"Browse by location..." is now "sticky" - it will keep the selected location as you leave and return.
One user reported a failure to Print, display range maps, etc... - everything where Scythebill uses a web browser. This release has a possible fix.
During taxonomic upgrades, Scythebill will create a backup file automatically. If the backup can't be created, Scythebill was dead in the water, and the user couldn't open their file at all! This is fixed.
As always, a variety of checklist corrections and updates are included.

New in Scythebill 14.1.1 (Aug 29, 2018)

Some individual changes are rather less obvious than the usual splits and lumps. Subspecies have moved from one species. If you're the sort of birder that always allocates sightings to subspecies, Scythebill will automatically do everything without you lifting a finger. If you're not, then Scythebill will let you know that you need to perform some taxonomic updates. But Scythebill can use its checklists to automate this in many cases. See the Scythebill manual for more information.
"Southern Gray Shrike" is now Iberian Gray Shrike, limited to just one subspecies, a non-migratory population in Portugal, Spain, and France. In the rest of its range, and all other subspecies, this is once again Great Gray Shrike. (IOC made a similar change in 8.2)
One subspecies of Black-backed Swamphen - viridis - has moved into Gray-headed Swamphen. This means that southeast Asian sightings have largely moved into Black-backed Swamphen.
There's some even subtler tweaks in species like New Caledonian Whistler and Kloss's Leaf Warbler which will affect the more internationally prolific travelers among you. Please see the link above for all the information.
One particularly difficult split in this version is Chivi Vireo, split off Red-eyed Vireo. If you've spent any time in South America during the northern winter, and have recorded "Red-eyed" Vireo there without any further details, it is unfortunately the case that you'll likely not be able to decide which species you've seen, as these species largely overlap in range and identification is extremely difficult. (If you've visited when Red-eyed Vireos are all back in North America, then life is much simpler.)
With this taxonomy, there's also five new internationalized name sets - Czech, Faroese, Italian, Mongolian, and French Canadian.
Changed system requirements
Scythebill on MacOS now requires MacOS 10.10 ("Yosemite") or later; this version was released back in 2014.
On Linux, Scythebill no longer supports 32-bit installations. If you don't know, you are probably using a 64-bit version.
(Scythebill also now requires a 64-bit installation of Windows; from what I can tell, this should not be an issue for the vast majority of users. If you don't know, you are probably using a 64-bit version.)
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 14.0.2 (Jul 3, 2018)

New in Scythebill 14.0.0 Beta (Jun 26, 2018)

This version adds a long-requested feature - you can now store sightings for multiple observers in a single .bsxm file! This is a new enough feature that I'm calling it a beta. I've tested it as I can, as always, but I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't a glitch here or there. (There's enough features now that testing all combinations is getting increasingly hard.). I could really use your help - even if you don't use this feature - in testing it out and letting me know if things are working or not! And if you do use the feature, please let me know if any part of it is confusing or just doesn't work the way you'd expect it to. I'm sure there'll be things to improve! I also haven't yet updated the manual to describe supporting multiple observers, but this page will include a quick walk-through of the feature.
There's also a bunch of other bug fixes in this version, described below:
Using multiple observers:
If you want to use multiple observers, visit the Preferences page and click the new "Enable multiple observers" button. You'll get a window asking you to enter your first observer. Enter a name, and click OK. After that, you can add more observers with the "Add..." button on the Preferences pane
Beyond that, there's:
A new "Observers" reporting rule for choosing reports with specific observers
New "Observer names" and "Observers" columns in Scythebill exports and imports
Wildlife Recorder import support for observers
Support for choosing the observers for all other sorts of imports
Bulk edit support for adding or removing observers
Other fixes:
Imports should be better at dealing with data where common names have been updated for splits, but scientific names not fixed (or vice versa). For example, an import of "Lesson's Motmot", "Momotus momota" (that's not the right scientific name!) in Lesson's Motmot's range will ignore the scientific name, but in Amazonian Motmot's range will ignore the common name.
If you add a lot of photos to a sighting, the later ones would become invisible. Those now pack a bit more tightly into the screen and a scrollbar appears if you have a lot.
"Save a copy as..." will now ensure that you have a file name ending in .bsxm.
Google geocoding was sometimes picking latitudes and longitudes for the entirely wrong state/province (for example, "Springfield" in the United States was always the lat-long of the city of that name in Massachusetts!).
Scythebill should do a better job of choosing decent fonts on Linux.
eBird/Clements once again supports Hebrew names.

New in Scythebill 13.9.4 (May 8, 2018)

New in Scythebill 13.9.3 (Mar 21, 2018)

New in Scythebill 13.9.1 (Jan 29, 2018)

OC 8.1:
The IOC 8.1 checklist is now available, and you can update to it just by installing the latest version of Scythebill. This time around, there's 6 splits from around the world, as well as a couple of lumps.
There's also a couple of subspecies which have moved from one species to another - in particular, the Indochinese subspecies "viridis" has moved from Black-backed Swamphen to Grey-headed Swamphen, which might affect your list.
Wildlife Recorder imports:
Scythebill now supports importing Wildlife Recorder "trip" exports. This is a beta version - please do let me know if you run into any problems.
Better imports:
"Scythebill"-format imports are now a lot more flexible in handling the date column. I still recommend "yyyy-MM-dd" formats (like 2018-01-27), but most date formats should import cleanly. Let me know if you hit upon one that doesn't!
Imports from eBird checklists (and Wildlife Recorder imports) should be even less work, as Scythebill now takes advantage of latitude/longitude from existing sightings and eBird's database of birding locales. (And this should continue to get better in the future.)
Smaller features
Scythebill now supports "Big Months" in addition to "Big Days" and "Big Years".
Scythebill now comes with "United States (Pacific Ocean)" and "United States (West Indies)" checklists.
The "Heard only" indicator - (H) - on sightings in "Browse by species" now comes right after the date, instead of after the date and location. (It was often scrolled off the screen altogether
You can now generate reports by exact breeding codes (like "Nest Building"), not just categories like "Probable". There's also a couple of new breeding codes from eBird - "Multiple (7+) singing males" and "Singing Male Present 7+ Days", both of which are considered "Probable" breeding. You can read the full list of breeding codes and their descriptions on the eBird site.
The "Visits" header inside "Browse by location" now shows the total number of visits to a site (e.g., "Visits (83)").
Bug fixes:
In some unusual circumstances, data entry could drop single-digit species counts.

New in Scythebill 13.9.0 (Nov 27, 2017)

ABA Region improvements:
As of the ABA Checklist Version 8.0, Hawaii (including the Northwestern Islands, like Midway) is now part of the ABA Region. Scythebill now adopts that treatment.
If you want to keep track of the old definition, Scythebill has added a reporting region called "ABA region (without Hawaii)".
Related to ABA listing, though not the ABA region itself: the Azores and Madeira are now included in Europe, after confirming this treatment with the ABA listing committee.
Small changes:
The Scythebill installer will now add desktop shortcuts on Windows and Linux.
Banggai and Taliabu Leaf Warblers - two undescribed taxa from Indonesia - are now supported.
The preferences for IOC and eBird/Clements common names previously included an "English (UK)" option which confused multiple users. It makes Scythebill use BOU names where applicable, names like "Wren" and "Swallow". It's been renamed to "English (BOU)" to make clear its intent.
As always, there's lots of small checklist improvements reflecting both corrections and recent new records.
Bug fixes:
The "Verify against checklists..." feature would incorrectly report some species as not found in the United Kingdom (e.g. Black-bellied/Grey Plover).
If you accidentally dragged some built-in locations (e.g. "Orange County") out of their parent, and wanted to move it back to its original location, Scythebill would give an error message. This is fixed.
One user reported that on Windows 10, trying to import a checklist was now crashing Scythebill! This should be resolved, though it apparently was not happening to most users.
Fixed an error ("Comparison method violates...") that could happen in "Browse by species" in some unusual cases.
Fixed an error triggered when editing a custom checklist and then switching between IOC and eBird/Clements.
Exporting eBird checklists for Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas would potentially not handle those regions' "states" correctly.
The built-in checklist for the Åland Islands was not loading.

New in Scythebill 13.8.0 (Aug 27, 2017)

New in Scythebill 13.7.0 (Jul 31, 2017)

IOC 7.3:
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 "Sirnak".
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 24, 2017)

New in Scythebill 13.5.0 (Jan 24, 2017)

New in Scythebill 13.4.1 (Jan 4, 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)

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.
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 13, 2016)

New in Scythebill 13.3.1 (Nov 11, 2016)

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)

New in Scythebill 13.2.4 (Oct 6, 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)

New in Scythebill 13.2.1 (Aug 15, 2016)

New in Scythebill 13.2.0 (Aug 14, 2016)

New in Scythebill 13.1.0 (Jul 28, 2016)

THE BRAND-NEW IOC 6.3 TAXONOMY:
The IOC 6.3 - just finalized in the last day or two - is now available in Scythebill! You can see all of the species-level changes on the IOC website. Some of the highlights include:
Two-way splits of Green Violetear, Vilcabamba Thistletail, Great-winged Petrel, Black-rumped Flameback , and Grey-breasted Wood Wren
Three-way splits of Plain-backed Thrush, Plain Wren, and Leach's Storm-Petrel
And a 10-way split of Red-bellied Pitta.
Plus the long-needed disappearance of Caribbean Coot as a color morph of American Coot
As always, all built-in checklists have been updated to follow the new taxonomy.
IOC 6.3 also includes support for several new languages, and they're supported in Scythebill 13.1 for species names:
Afrikaans
Catalan
Slovenian
Thai
EXTENDED TAXONOMY IMPROVEMENTS:
Extended taxonomies were just released in 13.0; this release includes some much-needed improvements.
Most importantly, it's now possible to update an extended taxonomy in-place without the overcomplicated workaround needed before. Just re-add the updated taxonomy, and Scythebill will automatically upgrade all your sightings to the new version. (If there's some sightings that it can't upgrade - because the taxonomy has changed too much - you may get prompted to save some sightings off to a Scythebill CSV format, so they can be manually re-imported after the upgrade.)
Other improvements include:
Extended taxonomies were not honoring the "Common, then scientific" (etc.) preference.
Importing an extended taxonomy from a CSV file broke if any of the lines were missing entries.
Opening .btxm files directly (instead of via the "Manage taxonomies..." menu) produced some confusing errors.
OTHER IMPROVEMENTS:
When exporting a report to a spreadsheet, you can now get "Heard only", "Immature", "Adult", "Male", and "Female" columns (select "Show sighting notes, count, etc.?")
The IOC and eBird/Clements taxonomies both now have English names for the bird orders
Scythebill now includes a United Kingdom checklist (generated by merging the England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales checklists)
There's a new "not by me" sighting status which the masochists among you can use to record times you've been gripped off. (Scythebill will not consider these sightings countable for your life list.)
The "most-likely subspecies" feature broke in 13.0; it should be working again
A small set of checklist improvements were included; in particular, Scythebill has aligned its India checklist with the recently released official checklist

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!
How extended taxonomies work:
I've got my hands full keeping the eBird/Clements and IOC taxonomies up-to-date, so extended taxonomies are built by you, the users of Scythebill.
All of this is documented in full detail in the Scythebill manual, but a quick summary:
First, a Scythebill user creates a new extended taxonomy, by editing a spreadsheet to have the right columns and rows, then creating a CSV file, and importing that into Scythebill from the new Manage taxonomies... page (under the File menu).
Then, if they want to share that taxonomy with others, they export that new extended taxonomy as a ".btxm" file - a Scythebill taxonomy file. These ".btxm" files are even easier to import.
And if they want to share that taxonomy with the entire Scythebill community, they'll share it with me, and I can make it available to everyone. (I do need you to verify I have permission from the original authors to distribute the taxonomy - no copyright lawsuits, please!)
Once you've added an extended taxonomy to your sightings file, you can switch to that taxonomy at any time with the same Taxonomy menu used to switch between eBird/Clements and IOC. Extended taxonomies are saved right inside your ".bsxm" sightings file, so there's no need to separately backup the taxonomy file or worry about transferring it between computers.
You can even import your existing sightings straight into an extended taxonomy. Not only are Scythebill-format CSV files supported, but also Observado and Avisys!
To get you started, I've made available one extended taxonomy - a world checklist of mammal species
Related changes:
I've 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:
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)

New in Scythebill 12.9.0 (Apr 22, 2016)

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)

New in Scythebill 12.8.2 (Feb 16, 2016)

New in Scythebill 12.8.1 (Feb 1, 2016)

New in Scythebill 12.8.0 (Jan 28, 2016)

New in Scythebill 12.7.1 (Jan 4, 2016)

New in Scythebill 12.7.0 (Dec 28, 2015)

This release adds a few relatively small features that you've been requesting:
Improvements in finding eBird hotspots
Easier access to visit data
"Domestic" forms of species
BirdLasser imports
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. Click that button, and you'll get a dialog where you can see (and edit) the visit data for that visit. Visit data's also more useful, as you can now create reports based on Visit comments text from Show reports.
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.
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 25, 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 (Sep 23, 2015)

New in Scythebill 12.5.0 (Sep 21, 2015)

New in Scythebill 12.4.2 (Aug 25, 2015)

New in Scythebill 12.4.1 (Aug 24, 2015)

New in Scythebill 12.4.0 (Aug 20, 2015)

eBird/Clements 2015 is now available:
Scythebill 12.4 includes the just released eBird/Clements 2015 taxonomy, with a mass of splits, like a 3-way split of Asian Paradise-Flycatcher, a 6-way split of Purple Swamphen, and a 15-way split of Variable Dwarf-Kingfisher! There's also a few new undescribed forms, like "New Caledonian" Storm Petrel, "Bananal" Spinetail, and "Elgin" Buzzard
I've updated all the checklists to account for these splits, but I'd caution that some of the work here is necessarily tentative. There is fairly little reliable information on some of these splits - if anyone reading this has solid data on the distribution of buzzards in southeast Asia, I'd certainly love to hear it
All users - whether they use the eBird/Clements checklist or the IOC checklist - may have a bit of work to do when they upgrade. Scythebill does all it can, using the subspecies you've entered and its checklists, to minimize the work, and the process is described in detail here in the manual. And you can always punt that work to later if there's splits you're not ready to resolve
Birdbase imports:
BirdBase recently closed its doors after literally decades of supporting the birding community. For all those users, Scythebill now supports directly importing BirdBase CSV exports! Just visit the Import screen, click the new Import from Birdbase... button, and open up a BirdBase export, and Scythebill will have all your data imported in a flash.
The Scythebill manual will (shortly) be updated to give some caveats and more details about the details of Birdbase imports, but generally it should work fairly simply. A few details that might be interesting here:
The "S1" through "S4" custom flags will, when set, be added to your sighting notes. You can use Show reports to find all notes containing those strings and then bulk edit to set a Scythebill field like "Heard only".
Scythebill will add one of "BirdBase Home", "BirdBase Region", or "BirdBase Local" locations when those BirdBase flags are set.
BirdBase did not include a complete and modern set of countries, so a few liberties have been taken (all "Yugoslavia" sightings are placed in Serbia; all Leeward Islands sightings end up in Montserrat; and so forth).
As always, after you import, I'd recommend visiting "Verify against checklists..." to look for issues revealed during the import (in particular, any mistakes Scythebill made assigning sightings to species - it's generally pretty darn good, but not perfect).
And if you have any problems with BirdBase imports, please let me know. I'm more than happy to personally import your file to Scythebill so I can fix any problems that lurk in this new feature.
I also think that I've improved Avisys imports - I suspect that locations will import more cleanly, and that files that did not import well (and took a long time to even report failure) will now import more cleanly.
Other changes:
The last version of Scythebill added preferences to control what you consider a lifer - skipping introduced or heard-only birds. But I missed several places in Scythebill where lifers are enumerated or listed (for example, in the "only lifers" view of a checklist). These should all be working as expected now.
The Canary Islands were a bit confused in Scythebill - available both in the Atlantic Ocean and as the Canarias province in Spain. There's now just a single Canary Islands location, in the Atlantic Ocean (and the country code is fixed, so importing to eBird will work).
There's also the usual set of checklist improvements, though this time it's only a few dozen fixes. As always, thanks to the users reporting problems.
The Browse by location screen would sometimes show "introduced" twice on a single line. That's fixed.
Printing was failing for Firefox users; this should now work.

New in Scythebill 12.3.0 (Jul 28, 2015)

The IOC 5.3 checklist - released 4 days ago - is now available:
The IOC 5.3 checklist was released on July 22nd, and Scythebill's already up-to-date. For the world listers out there, the highlights will likely be:
Purple Swamphen is split 5 ways.
Silver and Red-billed Gulls are lumped.
Four-colored and Gorgeous Bushshrikes are lumped.
For compatibility with this update, I've proactively made two changes to the eBird/Clements taxonomy:
Added Sichuan Bush-Warbler as a full species
Added crassirostris as a subspecies of Blue-winged Parrotlet (which IOC splits as a full species - prematurely, perhaps)
Checklists have been massively improved, and are now globally cleaned up:
Since the last release of Scythebill, I've been determined to finish cleaning up all the country checklists. And so I've gone through Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Ocean, correcting every last country's checklists against official checklists (or as close to official as I could get), adding and removing species, setting rarity status, and filling in earlier blanks for Andorra, San Marino, and South Sudan. The effort resulted in over ten thousand improvements! Done, right? No! After that, I went through all 10,705 species of birds, eyeballing each checklist-built range map to see how it matches with an "official" range and to look for oddities. That resulted in a few hundred more corrections and clarifications.
Once again, I'd strongly recommend that with this release you try out the "Verify against checklists..." option in the File menu. I suspect that at this point most of its findings will point out mistakes in your existing sightings, but I'm sure there are still some glitches in the checklists.
There are also still areas where I could use your help. I'm looking for anything resembling an official checklist for the following countries or regions (which have no checklists): Kosovo, North Korea, land Islands, and also for these countries, where the current checklists are largely guesswork based on surrounding countries: Moldova, Macedonia, Bosnia, Albania, Jordan, Syria.
Finally, I should note that the county-level checklists in Great Britain and Ireland are not in great shape. I don't have access to resources that would let me clean up the existing ones or add new counties to complete the set. I'm strongly considering removing these from the program altogether. Let me know if you feel strongly one way or the other.
New (small) features and fixes:
Getting the checklists cleared up took the vast majority of my time in this release, but I did get a chance to squeeze in a few improvements. Scythebill's preference screen has two new checkboxes.
If you are the sort of lister that doesn't count heard-only sightings, or doesn't want to consider introduced birds, you've had two choices until now. Either you didn't enter those sightings at all, or you hand-tuned reports to exclude those sightings. Now, just click one checkbox and you're done! Those sightings will still show up in reports, but they won't count in numeric totals, and they won't show up as "lifers" when you're entering species.
Scythebill will also now take advantage of the checklists to default a sighting's status to "introduced" or "not established". I'd always wanted to do this, but didn't trust the checklist contents enough to do so. Now I do! Also, sightings of the feral form of Rock Pigeon will automatically be entered as "introduced".
Also, I've gotten a few requests to allow entry of approximate counts - ">20", "~50", and so forth. So the count field now lets you enter any one character before the number. (eBird doesn't support approximate numbers, so when Scythebill exports to eBird, it'll drop that character and just send the number.)
Finally, there's some small bug fixes:
Scythebill reported an error if you tried to bulk edit the date of sightings that didn't have any date.
Users sometimes got errors when adding new locations in Browse by location.

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
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 25, 2015)

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. The implementation here is a starting point, not a final destination.
When you're entering species, there's a new Photos column. You can click on that camera icon - which will bring up a file chooser - or you can drag a file or a webpage onto that icon. (Note: webpages don't seem to work in Linux. I'll see if I can get this working in the near future.) When you do either, that camera icon will change to a number; and if you expand the sighting, you'll see the list of photos on the right side. You can click on the photo name to open it - it'll open (outside of Scythebill) in whatever application typically displays photos or webpages on your computer. You can also drag onto or click the "Drag a photo or click..." part of the page here to add more photos, or click the red X to remove a photo.
The same controls for adding and removing photos here are also everywhere you can edit sightings in Scythebill.
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).
I've also upgraded the IUCN Redlist status for all species (in both IOC and eBird/Clements) from 2012 to 2014. (It will surprise no one that most changes are not for the better, though there's the occasional bright spot.)
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. (This might find mistakes in the checklists, or it might find mistakes in your data; either way, I'm happy to hear.)
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've 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)

BETTER LOCATIONS:
The big new feature is improved location entry. Locations can now have latitude and longitude, and full text descriptions. But since it's tedious to enter latitude and longitude, Scythebill will automatically search for those locations using Google and eBird's "hotspots"! When it finds a result, it can:
Enter the latitude and longitude automatically
Show you a map of the location
Automatically find the state or even county, so you don't have to
Latitudes and longitudes are now part of the Scythebill import and export format, and will also be grabbed out of eBird imports.
This is all new code, and there may be a few rough edges - please let me know if anything doesn't work. (And in case you're wondering, no, Scythebill doesn't send any personal information - cookies, for example - to Google or eBird.)
MORE CHECKLIST IMPROVEMENTS:
A number of checklists have been reconciled for accuracy and rarity status:
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.
OBSERVADO.ORG AND WAARNEMING IMPORTS:
Scythebill now offers some experimental support for importing from observado.org files - which also supports waarneming.nl and waarneming.be. Do let me know if you have a chance to try this out!
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.

Scythebill Changelog

What's new in Scythebill 16.2.1

New in Scythebill 16.2.0 (Jan 14, 2024)

New in Scythebill 16.1.0 (Dec 24, 2023)

New in Scythebill 16.0.0 (Nov 9, 2023)

New in Scythebill 15.9.0 (Jul 24, 2023)

New in Scythebill 15.8.1 (Mar 5, 2023)

New in Scythebill 15.7.5 (Oct 31, 2022)

New in Scythebill 15.7.4 (Aug 9, 2022)

New in Scythebill 15.7.3 (Jul 13, 2022)

New in Scythebill 15.7.2 (Jun 20, 2022)

New in Scythebill 15.7.0 (Jun 12, 2022)

New in Scythebill 15.6.0 (Jan 19, 2022)

New in Scythebill 15.4.0 (Aug 30, 2021)

New in Scythebill 15.3.0 (Jul 16, 2021)

New in Scythebill 15.2.4 (Jul 8, 2021)

New in Scythebill 15.2.1 (Apr 27, 2021)

New in Scythebill 15.2.0 (Apr 25, 2021)

New in Scythebill 15.1.11 (Jan 25, 2021)

New in Scythebill 15.0.3 (Jan 5, 2021)

New in Scythebill 15.0.2 (Jan 3, 2021)

New in Scythebill 14.9.0 (Jul 20, 2020)

New in Scythebill 14.8.3 (Apr 12, 2020)

New in Scythebill 14.8.2 (Feb 23, 2020)

New in Scythebill 14.8.1 (Feb 19, 2020)

New in Scythebill 14.8.0 (Jan 26, 2020)

New in Scythebill 14.7.4 (Oct 27, 2019)

New in Scythebill 14.7.2 (Oct 13, 2019)

New in Scythebill 14.7.1 (Aug 29, 2019)

New in Scythebill 14.7.0 (Aug 18, 2019)

New in Scythebill 14.6.0 (Jun 24, 2019)

New in Scythebill 14.5.1 (Apr 27, 2019)

New in Scythebill 14.4.5 (Mar 4, 2019)

New in Scythebill 14.4.0 (Feb 18, 2019)

New in Scythebill 14.2.1 (Nov 25, 2018)

New in Scythebill 14.2.0 (Nov 23, 2018)

New in Scythebill 14.1.1 (Aug 29, 2018)

New in Scythebill 14.0.2 (Jul 3, 2018)

New in Scythebill 14.0.0 Beta (Jun 26, 2018)

New in Scythebill 13.9.4 (May 8, 2018)

New in Scythebill 13.9.3 (Mar 21, 2018)

New in Scythebill 13.9.1 (Jan 29, 2018)

New in Scythebill 13.9.0 (Nov 27, 2017)

New in Scythebill 13.8.0 (Aug 27, 2017)

New in Scythebill 13.7.0 (Jul 31, 2017)

New in Scythebill 13.6.0 (Apr 24, 2017)

New in Scythebill 13.5.0 (Jan 24, 2017)

New in Scythebill 13.4.1 (Jan 4, 2017)

New in Scythebill 13.4.0 (Dec 6, 2016)

New in Scythebill 13.3.2 (Nov 13, 2016)

New in Scythebill 13.3.1 (Nov 11, 2016)

New in Scythebill 13.3.0 (Nov 10, 2016)

New in Scythebill 13.2.5 (Oct 24, 2016)

New in Scythebill 13.2.4 (Oct 6, 2016)

New in Scythebill 13.2.3 (Aug 22, 2016)

New in Scythebill 13.2.1 (Aug 15, 2016)

New in Scythebill 13.2.0 (Aug 14, 2016)

New in Scythebill 13.1.0 (Jul 28, 2016)

New in Scythebill 13.0.0 (Jul 11, 2016)

New in Scythebill 12.9.1 (May 3, 2016)

New in Scythebill 12.9.0 (Apr 22, 2016)

New in Scythebill 12.8.3 (Mar 15, 2016)

New in Scythebill 12.8.2 (Feb 16, 2016)

New in Scythebill 12.8.1 (Feb 1, 2016)

New in Scythebill 12.8.0 (Jan 28, 2016)

New in Scythebill 12.7.1 (Jan 4, 2016)

New in Scythebill 12.7.0 (Dec 28, 2015)

New in Scythebill 12.6.0 (Oct 25, 2015)

New in Scythebill 12.5.1 (Sep 23, 2015)

New in Scythebill 12.5.0 (Sep 21, 2015)

New in Scythebill 12.4.2 (Aug 25, 2015)

New in Scythebill 12.4.1 (Aug 24, 2015)

New in Scythebill 12.4.0 (Aug 20, 2015)

New in Scythebill 12.3.0 (Jul 28, 2015)

New in Scythebill 12.2.0 (May 18, 2015)

New in Scythebill 12.1.0 (Apr 25, 2015)

New in Scythebill 12.0.0 (Mar 9, 2015)

New in Scythebill 11.2.0 (Feb 2, 2015)

New in Scythebill 10.6.3 (Dec 23, 2014)

New in Scythebill 2013 10.5.0 (Jul 28, 2014)