As is clear from this discussion, a 3 letter code does not work.
There is a well established 4 letter code for Australian birds. It works well with no ambiguities (apart from Brown Thornbill and Buff-rumped Thornbill would normally both be BRTB, so the latter is BUTH instead.)
Here it is (at least for SE Aust species, which are the ones I was interested in, as I was doing the data from Canberra, although I believe it works for all Australian species). The column labelled as RAOU is the Atlas number, which is the code often used to store the data. For example all of COG’s GBS data was stored by the RAOU number.
Philip
SPECIES.DOC
About 20 years ago I was given the same 4-letter list for SE Queensland and still use it but mainly as exif-‘tags’ for quick-access to my images using Picasa. (ie it is much easier to search for BFCS than Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike!)
Tom
I know there are lots of records from a government dataset in NSW of Grey Falcon from the northern tableands and coast. However, I always suspect the problem was that they used a 4 letter code and there was a recording or transcription error when the species involved actually was a Grey Fantail. Cheers, Peter
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Hi Phil, I have used, as mentioned before, a code based on the birds name for years. There are few ambiguities but some do exist. A Brown Thornbill (BT/b), Buff-rumped Thornbill (BRT/b). The two woodswallows cause a bit of a problem – White-breasted and White-browed as both could be written as WBW/s or even WBrW/s and Long-billed Corella and Little Black Cormorant (LBC’s) but I get over this one using LtBC. It all makes sense to me anyway………
Your codes will be worth comparing to see how much they are alike.