Kansas Birding Tools

Kansas Birding Listware

This is the first of several birding "tools" I hope eventually to share with Kansas birders. It is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that I prepared, with the help of Lloyd Moore, to keep track of my own Kansas county, year, and life lists. (You must have Microsoft Excel or an equivalent program to use it.) It is small enough to use on a PDA and contains a number of time-saving features, including automatic totaling of every list. You can use any character, or dates, to record your sightings. The spreadsheet automatically records each species in your Kansas life list whenever you first record it in any county. The bird list matches the current (10th) edition of the Kansas Ornithological Society's checklist of Kansas birds, updated with new species accepted by the Kansas Bird Records Committee through September 10, 2006.

If you are experienced with Excel, you can customize the spreadsheet just about infinitely to suit your personal preferences. I've included a few handy Custom Views ("View: Custom Views..." menu) that display and print various subsets of the data, as examples of some of the things you could do yourself. I use it to print custom checklists when I go on a birding trip (see "Custom Views: Trip List Template") by selecting only the counties that I plan to visit. My year and/or life list appears at the front of the list, and my previous county records print in light blue (or gray); this allows me to tell at a glance whenever I see a personal "first" for a county and also facilitates recordkeeping for the trip. The autofilter feature allows quick but powerful analyses of your lists, and I have provided a collapsible family and order outline for further convenience. If there is sufficient interest, I might give a brief seminar on advanced uses at an upcoming KOS meeting.

If you are using a Windows version of Netscape or Internet Explorer, you can just right-click on the link above to save the file on your computer (select "Save Target As..." from the pulldown menu).