I'm a listing geek, but my gosh don't I just know it

After reading in quite a few peoples different blogs and talking to different birders. There seem to be quite a few birders that don't keep track of their lists. Is this because listing has got a recent bad press due to the programme and birders want to try and distance themselves from being associated with that? Personally I think keeping lists is a great thing, I'll probably come across a bit weird now but oh well. The reason I keep such a detailed list is because its such an easy reference tool, I'm not obsessed with adding new birds to my list. Of course I like doing that, but if a bird is reported that I haven't seen before the first thing I think isn't how quickly can I get there but about the finder of that particular bird. Do I know them? Wonder what it was like finding x? Probably why I like the Finders Keepers articles on Birdguides


Probably similar to most people who actually keep lists I have mine laid out in excel. So thought I'd put up a few screen shots of my list and maybe it will inspire some of you to do similar, or more than likely just prove how weird I am.

Points scores for species from http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=157697http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=157697

This shows the bottom of my list and the various different stats and information that I can quickly gather from looking at this.

This is another part of the area under the list with various different pieces of information.

This table shows 2010 broken down into how many lifers, yearers etc in each individual month.

This is a list of the birds that I have seen that my Dad hasn't and vice versa for the year and life. Nice reference tool for gripping Dad off, especially for the year! Red/Orange/Green highlights show how hard/medium/easy a bird will be to get back either in the year or life. 

A seperate sheet to the above, has the order of birds I have seen in that particular month, only started this year in Feb. Red highlight is a lifer and green is a highlight bird/species. Orange over the number means I have only seen that species on one occasion/location this year.

This is the last page that I call bogey picking. Basically its all the birds that are on my 'list' but not if you understand that. I've then split them into categories of where I need to go in order to see them.

As you can probably tell from those screen shots there are a lot of different components to my list but its nice to be able to go through it and pick out random trivia from it really easily but mainly its just so I can turn to my dad and say, I have seen 24 more species than you this year because what's birding without a bit of competition!

If anyone else has a similar system to this then I'd love to hear from you and anything that you do differently to me!