Southeast Arizona Monthly Checklists -- Background
I created the initial versions of my southeastern Arizona monthly checklists in 1996, about 3 years after I started guiding here. Back then, the main purpose was to provide prospective clients with a realistic view of the potential species during the specific month of their visit. This was a successful venture and the checklists still provide that function today. However, the initial versions were created entirely "by hand"  -- poring over data and using a text editor to create those lines of dots and abundance codes. Underlining, italicizing, capitalizing. Yikes! Needless to say, I realized that I couldn't continue to produce them in such a slow and tedious manner and I thought about ways to automate the task. I'm happy to say that production of the checklists is now almost entirely automatic with very little manual work required -- and it only took me ten years to finally make that happen!

There are two major tasks involved in the production of checklists. The first and most important is collecting the data that represents the basis of any checklist -- i.e. when birds come and go and how common they are, essentially their status and abundance. Not quite as difficult nor as time consuming, but still of major importance, is the task of converting the data into a format that is as useful as possible given the (physically) small size of typical checklists. So many checklists fall way short of this goal (in fact, sometimes it's not very clear what their goal is).

My first step was to write software to generate bar graphs so that I could easily understand the data I was gathering on a daily basis. No point just sticking it into the computer if you can't see it in a way that's really useful. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. There wasn't (still isn't) any commercial software to do this so I rolled my own in 1997. You can see examples of such bar graphs elsewhere on this site.

This was all well and good but, as a data source, these real-world bar graphs suffer from two obvious problems. Holes, 4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire (showing my age now). No matter how much data I gather, there'll always be holes because of insufficient visits. Also, these bar graphs represent the actual chances of seeing a bird rather than true abundance (i.e. the thickness of the lines is proportional to the ratio of my sightings versus visits). While this is infinitely useful in deciding where to go to target a bird (I can automatically generate itineraries based on this data), it's not the way that data is presented in most checklists.

The next step was to write more software, this time a "bar graph editor", which I did in 2000.  This was another component that I couldn't buy (at least not in a useable format). Now I could smooth out the holes and normalize the data to create standard bar graphs that represent actual abundance (or at least my interpretation of abundance).

After years of mulling it over, I began writing the software for the final piece of the puzzle towards the end of 2004. This was a "Checklist Generator" that reads standardized bar graphs and spits out data in a format suitable for creating HTML or WORD documents. There was a lot of work involved but now I can easily react to changes in taxonomy and changes in status and abundance by simply modifying the source data (i.e. the bar graph) and update a checklist very quickly.

Where's the beef (data)?
I liken all the years of effort to making sausages -- you throw all the ingredients into the hopper, crank the handle for a while (all the time trying not to think too much about what's in there) and finally, out pops a sausage. After the first, all the rest are easy!

Obviously, even twenty years worth of personal data from limited locations is of very little significance in the grand scheme of things. Consequently, in producing the current version of the monthly checklists I have relied extensively on published data in addition to my own data. I have used the bar graphs in the two SE AZ birdfinding guides (where there is much conflicting data) and other sources including "The Birds of Arizona", "Annotated Checklist of the Birds of Arizona" and internet reports.

My own data comes into play by giving perspective to all the other data. One can argue interminably about actual abundance levels and, as intimated above, there are many differences of opinion or interpretation on this. One person's common is another's fairly common and so on. However, the relative abundance of birds (in proper habitat) is much easier to discern and quantify. Therefore, I mostly use my data to "scale" abundances versus published data where I believe it to be misleading. Also, I use my own data to more accurately determine when changes in abundance occur -- i.e. when birds arrive and depart, pass through in migration, etc.