You have probably seen printed seasonal checklists for various areas of the country. They graphically display the times of year for different bird species, and the likelihood of seeing a particular species (usually denoted by the thickness of the line). Now you can generate your own! The seasonal checklist generator lets you make a seasonal checklist from your own sightings, or from the regional (internet) database. Naturally, the more sightings you have, the more accurate the checklist will become. The resulting checklist looks like that shown below (the print preview screen is shown). As you can see, after a couple of years of logging sightings, I still need more to make it look "right"! With people contributing to the internet database, though, it should fill in quickly!
There are a number of options you can use when generating the checklist:
The City/County, Location, and Minor Location drop-downs allow you to specify a particular area for the checklist. These are based on the locations drop-downs that you entered when you input your sightings. Future version will allow you to specify a region on-screen as well.
The Checklist Title box allows you to enter a custom title for the checklist.
The "Show frequency as the bar height" check box will determine the relative frequency (number of birds seen per location visit) for each counting period and will vary the width of the line from bird to bird. If this box is unchecked, the width of the line will remain constant throughout all months of the year and for all the birds.
The "Show frequency for each counting period" check box allows you to specify whether to vary the width of the line as the year progresses, based on the counting frequency.
The "Counting Period" drop-down lets you define the counting period. If you say monthly, for example, all the birds seen in that month will be counted and the line will be plotted based on that number. If you say "Two Weeks", all the birds seen in a two-week period will be counted and the line plotted based on that. The "finest" counting period is one week.
Note: The smaller the counting period, the more data you need to make the checklist look good. Setting one week, for example, with too little data will create gaps in the checklist.