Birdstack Shut Down

The February 25 demise of this bird sightings website will leave a gap in the market, as I wrote over a year ago. Indeed, Birdstack was then the answer to a prayer and now just eBird remains, although it has gone worldwide. At least it’s accepted my last few months’ sightings from the UK, provided I bulk upload them instead of exporting from Birdstack.

All is not lost but a few species will be. eBird follows Clements, which is not as generous as the IOC with splits. This won’t affect site or even county and country lists so much but my world tally will definitely suffer. As will Hampshire and Somerset because eBird is mega-strict and up-to-date with county definitions. If you supply latitude and longitude, they override whatever you specify for county, and presumably country. (Although Blagdon Lake doesn’t seem to be right: I’ve had to shift the marker for its North Somerset portion a considerable way west to put it in the correct district.)

Many links in this blog will break, especially those to the Birdstack widgets, so I’ll have to point them elsewhere as time goes on. I haven’t played so much with eBird to see what’s available but nothing has jumped out so I’m not hopeful. And as for more specialised lists, like car-free or trips… should I go back to Wildlife Recorder?

Tweet

Related posts:

1. Scientific Names in Birdstack
2. Birdstack Widgets
3. All I Want for Christmas

January 6th, 2012 | Tags: listing, sightings, solutions, taxonomy, websites | Category: Reporting the news

4 comments to Birdstack Shut Down

• George MacDermid

  January 7, 2012 at 03:22

  Hi. I am GmacD on Birdstack. There may be hope fo the site. My daughter has experiance setting up and running websites. She has made contact with the owners, regarding taking over or purchasing the site. I can keep you informed of the progress if you would like. There would be no plans to change Birdstack, other then to possibly allow some limited advertising to defray operating costs and to speed up the operations as I am sure you have found Birdstack to very slow at times. I would appreciate any suggestion you may have.,
  Thank you , George MacDermid, Canada

• Andy

  January 9, 2012 at 22:35

  This is brilliant news, George, and anything I can do to help with rusty, ancient programming skills… Yes, Birdstack was a trifle slow, i.e. not without its faults, but still the best thing on the Web. Please keep us in the loop.

• Stuart Cooney

  April 30, 2012 at 03:21

  As someone who is still missing Birdstack, I wonder if there has been any progress with re-launching Birdstack? As Andy says, Birdstack was far superior to anything else on the web for my purposes! In terms of suggestions, the only one that regularly occurred to me was that it would be good to have tick boxes to enable bulk changes to sightings, species, locations etc. Good luck with your efforts! Stuart (Elanus)

• Andy

  May 1, 2012 at 12:33

  All I know is what it says on their home page: to whit, code mothballed and data in a CSV file. So I think it’s RIP for them. I didn’t hear any more about someone else taking over.

This work by Andy Gibb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. So, you may republish any article but please link back here with amazing keywords. Cheers! http://thepokerbird.com/feed
The site also uses Google Analytics and so creates tracking cookies and collects non-identifiable data about you. Finally (yawn!) I am a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk