Entirely up to you, but I always count heard birds, saves so much time and effort for a year list! Heard on a life list is more problematic, I simply keep them as a sub-category of Heard Only, a bit like purgatory really with a hope of eventual promotion to seen = Salvation! A friend of mine from Arizona calls us visual bigots, but there we are. Happy Listing Cheers Phil Gregory ===============================
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Has the original question been answered? The answer is that it depends whether you are: setting a specific challenge, goal or activity for yourself; abiding by a set of rules for a competition (“listing”); recording the presence of birds in a particular area. WRT recording presence, I use every reliable sign available. Depending on the species and context I have used (alone and in combinations) sightings, calls, mechanical sounds (bill clapping, drumming, wing beats, and the sound of a silent owl in a silent forest landing on a branch), secondary calls (i.e. alarm calls), carcasses, feathers, bones, nests (including burrows, hollows and woven nests), display sites (bowers, leks, mounds), feeding signs (ground scratchings, chewed cones, prey remains [carcasses, feather piles, pitta anvils, bird heads, possum tails, pellets], plant damage, etc), droppings, foot prints (especially Cassowaries), at least. If the question was “what are the rules for year ticking competitions” it depends who the competition is with. I would say year lists are not about recording the “presence” of birds during a year, but about what a person records, or what a person sees. I suspect that the big Australian year lists (Wheeler, Bartram, Entwhistle and Dooley) and International year lists did NOT count heard birds on their year lists. Perhaps Sean can advise. ===============================
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