Creating and Editing Trips and Ticks in J-Bird (Version 0.5.2)

Summary of trips

• Trips are displayed in a hierarchical tree when the "browse/edit trips" is selected as the main task.
• To create a new trip, click on the "Create new trip" menu item, or right-click (ctrl-click on Mac OS X) on any entry in the tree and select "Create new trip".
• A form will appear. Fill it out and dismiss it.
• Use a date of the form YYYY-MM-DD.
• Type in the name of a region, or select one from the pop-up list.
• Provide a locality.
• Keywords and notes are optional.
• When typing notes, skip lines between paragraphs. Pressing return begins a new paragraph.
• Species can be ticked immediately after the dialog is dismissed, or ticking can be deferred.
• Clicking on triangles opens and closes branches in the tree of trips.
• Right-clicking (ctrl-clicking on OS X) on a trip in the tree of trips, brings up a menu of possibilities including:
• View/edit species ticks,
• View/edit trip information (that was entered when the trip was created),
• Display trip report,
• Create new trip,
• Delete trip.
• The hierarchy can be changed by selecting the view button. Possible views include:
• Region -> trip
• Region -> year -> trip
• Region -> year -> month -> trip
• Year -> trip
• Year -> month -> trip
• Year -> region -> trip
• Year -> region -> month -> trip
• Several trips can be selected at once by holding down the ctrl key while clicking on them. On Mac OS X, hold down the apple key while clicking.
• Ticks from several trips can be edited at once by selecting them and then right-clicking on one of the selected trips and selecting "edit all selected trips"
• Several trips can be deleted at once by selecting them then right-clicking on one of the selected trips and selecting "delete all selected trips"
• When finished with trips, dismiss the tree window and select an alternative selection from list of tasks.

Summary of ticks

• To tick species observed on one or more trips, select the trips as described above in the summary of trips, right-click (ctrl-click on Mac) and select the option for viewing/editing species lists. If checklists are available, you will be asked to select a checklist for ticking. Otherwise, the master species list will be used.
• Species are ticked from a table in which rows are species and columns are individual observers on trips.
• The table contains family names. Families can be opened or closed by clicking on the ">"s or "V"s that appear to the left of family names. Tables with 800 species or more open with all families closed.
• Species names displayed can be common or scientific. Use the View menu to toggle between common names and scientific names.
• Species can be ticked as present/absent, or counts can be recorded. Use the View menu to toggle between ticks and counts.
• If ticking, presence is represented by checkboxes. If notes have been made, "n"s are displayed to the right of appropriate checkboxes.
• To tick or untick species, click on the checkboxes.
• To add, edit or delete notes, right-click (ctrl-click on Mac) on the appropriate checkbox, and select from the menu that pops up.
• If recording counts, unseen species are denoted by an underscore, counts, counts by the appropriate numbers, and presence by "X"s. If notes have been made, an icon of a canary-colored sheet of paper appears to the right of the appropriate counts.
• To enter a count for a species, click on the appropriate table cell. A cursor will appear. Type in the number. Zero or blank deletes the tick.
• To add, edit, delete notes, right-click (ctrl-click on Mac) on the appropriate table cell, and select from the menu that pops up.
• Ticks can be added/deleted by right-clicking on them and selecting from the pop-up menu.
• To tick species that do not appear in the table but are present in the master species list, use the View menu to select "Alternative checklist ..." and choose a more general checklist. Species that have been seen on a trip, but are not in the checklist that is currently being used will be displayed.
• Individual columns of the table can be toggled between ticks and counts, by right-clicking (ctrl-clicking on Mac) in the column titles and selecting from the pop-up menu.
• Individual columns can be dropped from the table by right-clicking (ctrl-clicking on Mac) in the column titles and selecting from the pop-up menu.
• When finished ticking, dismiss the table window.
• Images can be displayed and/or sounds played for life ticks and for region ticks.

Overview

J-Bird is organized around the idea of observing birds on trips. Trips are displayed in a hierarchical tree. You can use the tree to create new trips, to select trips and edit information about them or edit the species that have been seen on them, and also to delete trips (and all ticks that are associated with them). You'll select a trip from the tree and right-click (ctrl-click on Mac OS X) on it select from the pop-up menu that appears. In response to your selection, dialogs will appear that can be used to enter/edit information about trips or for selecting species and creating notes for species that have been observed. Dismiss the dialogs when you are finished with them.

The tree of trips

To display the tree of trips and work with it, use the main task tab to select "create/edit trips and ticks". A dialog will appear and display trips hierarchically. Before you create your first trip, only a single entry will be present.

After creating a number of trips, the tree might appear like the tree to the right. Branches of the tree (regions in this case) can be opened and closed by clicking on them. The scroll bar can be used to scroll up and down over the tree.

The tree hierarchy can be changed. For example, instead of displaying trips within regions, it is possible to display trips within years or to display trips within years within regions. Also available are trips within months within years and trips within months within regions within years. Use the view button to select the view that you prefer. Shorter views (i.e., trips within regions or trips within years) are usually best until you accumulate some trips.

Trips can be selected singly or multiply, and the process of selecting trees depends on the type of computer that you have.

• Linux and Windows
• A trip must be selected before requesting a pop-up menu.
• To select one trip, click on it with the left mouse button.
• To select several trips:
• Select first trip by clicking on it.
• Add trips to selection by holding down the ctrl key while clicking on trips.
• To obtain a pop-up menu, right click on any trip (the selection will be unaffected by the click).
• Mac OS X
• Clicking to bring up a pop-up-menu also selects/unselects the trip. If a trip has already been selected when you request a pop-up menu, the trip will be unselected before the menu pops up. Use the following instructions.
• To select one trip and bring up a pop-up menu, ctrl-click on the unselected trip.
• To select several trips:
• Select first trip by clicking on it.
• Add trips to selection by holding down the apple key while clicking on trips. Do this for all but the last trip to be selected.
• To select the last trip and bring up a pop-up menu, hold down the apple key and the ctrl key while you click on the final trip to be selected.

Creating trips

To create a trip, click on the menu item "Create new trip", or right-click (Linux and Windows) or ctrl-click (Mac OS X) on the tree to obtain a pop-up menu and select "Create new trip". A dialog like that shown will appear.

• The date must be in the form YYYY-MM-DD. The current date is provided, but it can be changed.
• Either select a region by clicking on the arrow tab, or click in the text field and type in the name of the region. Regions can be re-organized, so don't fret about the regions that you create.
• Locality usually describe where the trip was within the region. The entry that you use will be what you see (along with the date) when selecting trips.
• Keywords are free-form. J-Bird displays them in trip reports but does not use them otherwise.
• To make notes about the trip, click in the box and start typing. Press return only when you want to create a new paragraph. When displayed, paragraphs are separated by a blank line (and are not indented). Copy/cut/paste are available via the Edit menu. The text that you type is stored as a web document (HTML). If you are fluent with HTML, you can use the View menu at the top of the note box to display HTML, and you can edit the HTML directly. Be warned, however, that Java is very picky about HTML and that you must enter complete HTML. For example, you cannot get away with omitting the end-of-paragraph tags and end-of-list-item tags.
• Unless you tick the checkbox, a checklist from which you can tick species observed on the trip will appear as soon as you dismiss the trip information dialog. It is useful to delay ticking of species if you wish to create several trips and tick the species seen at the same time.
• Click "Commit" to create the trip.

Ticking species that have been seen on trips

There are two ways to obtain a checklist from which you can tick species that you have observed on trips: create a trip without ticking the check box "Defer ticking of species"; and select one or more trips from the trip tree and click to display a pop-up menu as described in the previous section and then select "View/edit species list". You will be presented with a choice of checklists to use if checklists exist, and then you will be presented with the selected checklist from which you can tick species.

The checklist contains family names and species names. All species will be displayed if the checklist contains fewer than 600 species. Otherwise, only family names will be displayed. Species within families can be displayed by clicking on the ">" that precedes family names, and they can be hidden by clicking on the "V"'s that precede names of families that are expanded.

A column is present in the checklist table for each observer in the database for each trip that was selected. Columns can be dropped from the table by using a pop-up menu that is associated with column headers. Right-click in the appropriate column header, or ctrl-click on Mac OS X, and select "drop column" from the menu that pops up.

The Find menu allows you to activate the species finder. You can search species names, family names or both by selecting the appropriate check boxes. If hidden families are searched, they will be opened if species are found in them. Otherwise, only species in expanded families will be searched. To search, type a name or partial name in the text box and press return or click the "Next" button.

Regular expressions allow you specify patterns rather than literal strings. For example, to search for color or colour the pattern would be colou?r. The question mark indicates zero or one occurrence of the letter before it. If you you are unsure whether Night-Heron is hyphenated, you could specify night[- ]heron. The square brackets indicate that any one of the enclosed letters is OK. Here it was a hyphen and a space. More information about using patterns is available on the finders page .

You can tick to indicate which species were seen, or you can enter counts of the number of individuals that were observed. Ticks will be displayed for the first trip that you edit. You can switch between ticks and counts by using the View menu on the window that contains the checklist. It is also possible to tick from checklists in which some columns contain ticks and others counts as in the checklist that is shown below. To change the display of a single column, move the mouse to the column heading and right-click on Windows and Linux or ctrl-click on Mac OS X. A menu will appear that allows you to toggle between ticks and counts.

If ticking species, click on the check boxes to tick or untick species. If entering counts, click in a cell to edit the value. A cursor will appear. Enter an appropriate number: positive numbers reflect numbers of individuals seen, 0 indicates that the species was not seen. You can use an X to indicate that a species was observed but not enumerated. You can press return when finished with a count or move the mouse out of the cell that you have been editing.

Notes can be associated with individual species. They are represented on tick checklists as "n"'s and on count checklists as canary-colored sheets of paper as shown in the checklist above. To enter or edit notes for an observation, pop-up a menu for the appropriate cell by right-clicking on Windows and Linux and ctrl-clicking on Mac OS X. Select the item "Edit notes". A dialog will appear in which you can click to activate and then type notes. As with trip notes, press return where you want paragraph breaks to be. Notes are stored as web documents (HTML), and it is possible to see and edit the HTML using the View menu of the dialog. Again, Java is picky about HTML and does not tolerate deviations from the standard that are gracefully handled by most web browsers. Dismiss the notes window when finished with a note.

Notes can be deleted in two ways: select the "delete note" entry in the pop-up menu that is associated with a cell, or select "edit note" and use the Edit menu -> Clear item to clear all text before dismissing the notes window.

Gratifiers

J-Bird can pop-up images and play sounds to celebrate life ticks, region ticks and trip ticks. These features can be turned on and off by editing your preferences (Edit -> Preferences).

J-Bird is installed with sound turned off to prevent problems on computers that do not have sound cards. The sounds are

• Life tick - Canyon Wren (Catherpes mexicanus),
• Region tick - Rufous-browed Peppershrike (Cyclarhis gujanensis),
• Trip tick - Pale-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus guatemalensis).
• Duplicate trip tick - Red-cockaded Woodpecker (Picoides borealis).

As indicated in the License section, these recordings are (P) Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics, Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, all rights reserved.

You can use alternative sound files. Use the preferences dialog (Edit -> Preferences) to specify alternative files. Click on the name of the file, and a file-chooser dialog will appear. After you've chosen a file, you will be able to edit the credit. The following formats are supported by Java and should be usable:

• AU,
• WAVE,
• AIFF (not tested),
• RMF (Rich Music Format - not tested), and
• MIDI (type 0 and type 1 - not tested).

Note that Java cannot deal with some methods of compression, and that it is difficult to determine from documentation which methods are supported and which are not. Your best bet is to try, and to fall back to older methods of compression until you find one that works. (Note that components of the preferences editor that allow you to set a sound file to be played in response to errors have been disabled because, J-Bird is not yet capable of playing sounds in responses to errors.)

Trip reports

Trip reports list information about a trip including: date, region, locality, keywords, trip notes, observers, species observed and species notes. Reports can be configured to contain some or all of the information just listed. They can be displayed in the default web browser or written to files as web (HTML) documents. J-Bird provides no means of printing trip reports. To print a trip report, display it in a web browser and used the browser's print feature.

To prepare a trip report, select a trip in the tree of trips and pop-up a menu by right-clicking on the trip on Linux or Windows and by ctrl-clicking on Mac OS X. A dialog will appear that can be used to configure the trip report.

• Destination: may be browser or file. If file, a file selection dialog is used to name the output file. It should appear when you select File as the destination or by clicking on the file name if you have already selected File as the destination.
• Trip notes: include or omit. Note that the * between the date and locality indicates that there are notes for this trip.
• Species notes: include or omit. Has no effect on format if no note exists.
• Species counts: include indicates that counts will be displayed. X's indicate that species were observed but counts were not recorded. They are used for all species if counts are omitted.
• Observers: if included, a table will be prepared in which rows are species and columns are observers, and if omitted, species observed will be listed.
• Checklist: if checklists have been defined, it is possible to include a checklist in a trip report. The idea is to list species that might have been seen but were not seen. If included, a pop-up checklist selector appears, and the name of the selected checklist appears below the include/omit selector.
• Click on "OK" to produce the report. To cancel, either click "Cancel" or dismiss the window.

Trip report tip

Trip reports can be converted from web pages (HTML files) into Microsoft Word documents using recent versions of Microsoft Word.

• Set the destination of a trip report to be a file. It will be saved as an HTML file.
• In Microsoft Word select Open in the file menu.
• Configure the file browsing dialog to list all types of documents.
• Browse the file system and select a trip report.
• After the trip report is opened by Word, select "Save as ..." in the File menu.
• In the dialog that appears, set the document type to "Microsoft Word Document".