Scythebill : Birdwatcher’s Software to Record Bird Sightings

Birdwatchers all over the world spend a lot of time spotting birds of different kinds in many different locations. They usually document their findings in forms of pictures, video and audio recordings. But there is more to recording and documenting the bird sightings. For example, they also record the location, time and coordinates where the bird was spotted.

For recording and managing all the bird sightings anywhere in the world, birdwatchers can use a free software called Scythebill. It can be used to track all of your bird sightings going back many decades of your life. Based on the information entered, we can categorize these lists based on the species, time located and the spotting location.

Scythebill is designed using the Oracle Java programming language. This is why it is complete free and open-source. The program is also very easy to work with. In order to install and run the application, you have to first download the Java Runtime Environment which can be downloaded from https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/downloads/.

Scythebill

After Java has been installed, we can simply double-click on the JAR file for Scythebill. The small window belonging to Scythebill opens up in which we can create a new database of the bird sightings. The bird sighting file is saved with an extension BSXM (bird sighting XML).

We can start entering the new data by clicking on the Enter sightings button. When you have added a number of bird sightings, you can click on the Show reports button to generate and view a comprehensive reports based on the bird sightings.  We can browse the created database of bird sightings by species or locations.

If you have been using some other bird sighting software so far, then you can import their database into Scythebill easily. Scythebill support importing of database file from eBird, Avisys, Bird base, BirdBrain, Bird Track, BirdLasser, Birder’s Diary, Wildlife Recorder, iNaturalist, Ornitho and Wings.

You can download Scythebill software from https://www.scythebill.com/.