A request for list members.
Would the people/person who developed short acronyms or ‘series of letters’ for Australian species codes please send me a copy of their code list or direct me to where this can be found?
Martin O’Brien Melbourne
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Dear all
Just by the way, here is an extract from my First Edition of the Macquarie Dictionary:
“bifcus…Colloq. a black-faced cuskoo-shrike. [from the letters BFCS]”
Shirley
I’m not prepared to learn a code, and fearing ambiguities I’ve resorted to my own longer abbreviations instead. E.g. B-faced C-shrike instead of BFCS should be easier to interpret should names change in the future. Other examples: Sup F-wren, LB Corm, P Swamp, W-plumed HE. There’s more writing than a 4 letter code, but less danger of misinterpretation even when I make them up on the spot.
I’ve thought of making checklists for places I go a lot, so I can just tick them off, but haven’t got around to it. That would make entering them into Eremaea later much faster.
I’ve also thought of using a recorder, but I know I’ll never get around to transcribing them, and they’ll end up just being lost.
I’m wondering if people using iPhone apps, etc, have found they can enter the full names just as quickly as entering codes or abbreviations.
Doesn’t this topic get done to death several times a year on birding-aus?
Peter Shute ===============================
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Hi Martin,
I first came across a four letter code for bird records when doing some survey work for State forests in NSW in the 90’s.
The basic format is this: the code represents the first four letters in the bird’s formal name, with variations on the theme where required, as follows.
A single word bird name such as Galah would be Gala
A double word bird name such as Striated Thornbill would be St Th
A three word bird name such as Gang-Gang Cockatoo would be GG Co
A four word bird name such as Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike would be Bf Cs, although when I use the code I always put in the hyphens as an added cue to the bird’s identity – e.g. B-f C-s or G-G Co for the Gang-Gangs above.
The hyphens also help to separate some species that would otherwise be difficult to separate, such as Brown Thornbill (Br Th), and Buff-rumped Thornbill (B-r Th), or Masked Lapwing (Ma La), and Magpie-lark (Ma-la), or Little Black Cormorant (L B Co), and Long-billed Corella, (L-b Co). Using capitalisation where it falls also helps to separate species as you can see from these examples.
There will always be those species that you can’t easily separated, because their codes are the same, such as White-breasted Woodswallow (W-b Wo), and White-browed Woodswallow (W-b Wo), so you might have to add another digit, such as W-bs Wo and W-bw Wo respectively. It won’t ring true if you’re trying to develop a four letter code database but neither would the hyphens in such a case. Overlaps are not that frequent for local lists, but they do add an element of ambiguity for referencing down the track or when you are listing or surveying on a large trip or large area, where many species will be encountered.
I do know of a number of folk who give birds their own four letter codes as their imagination dictates, but the above code is one more formal approach that I have used now for many years. I find it very useful for saving on note pad paper and being able to get down many species when activity is high. it does take some getting used to, especially when you have to interpret them later, or worse still, you pass them on to have someone else interpret them.
i have noticed lately, while entering bird names into datbases (encompassing all fauna guilds) that many species have sequences of letters that bring only one species up very quickly with few characters entered, such as ie- for Magpie-lark, toeb for Mistletoebird, er-ey for Silver-eye or llarb for Dollarbird. A difficult method to take on board, because you would have to remember all of the codes without a format formula to follow, but especially powerful when others may have to enter your data into a database and you are not around to give them help when they get stuck.
I would guess that most four letter codes are similar or a variation on the above more formal theme.
All the best,
Allan Richardson Morisset, NSW
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