Or specific name and group name, and the specific name always gets two letters and the group name two letters.
There are no published rules for resolving collisions in the BBL system, but I have observed the patterns below.įirst, note that the basic rules for two- or three-word names divide the name into a “first name” and “last name”, I don't know the source of today's rules. However, nomenclature was quite different then as well. I went back and read the 1978 paper by Klimkiewicz and Robbins where the first rules for banding codes were published, and those rules are slightly different.
You can just use the basic rules that I describe here, and if you hit a species where the code is ambiguous, Moreover, in eBird you don't even need to learn the special case codes Your data entry speed is greatly increased when you use band codes in eBird. I highly recommend learning band codes for your eBird data entry,Įspecially if you use the mobile app. The foremost example of such is data entry into a program such as eBird. However, the exact opposite of public or long-term use is private, short-term use,Īnd band codes can be an excellent time saver for such use. What you were thinking when you recorded an observation of REHA. They are a barrier against communication with the general birding public,Īnd they are subject to errors-When you are reviewing today's records twenty years from now, you don't want to be puzzling over I preach against use of band codes for two main reasons: Worse, the BBL and IBP code sets differ in some of these ad hoc codes. Unfortunately, if you want to use the codes, you simply must memorize the special cases there is no way around it. In these cases, different codes had to be created ad hoc. The basic codes were derived from a simple set of rules for reducing a name to four letters.Ī major problem is that the rules can create “collisions” cases where two (or more) different names reduce to the same four letters. The first codes were created by the Bird Banding Laboratory (BBL) for use by bird banders in submitting data Ĭonsequently the codes are frequently referred to as “banding codes”.Ī slightly different set of codes has been published by the Institute for Bird Populations (IBP). Other Resources ( NOT sponsored by Carolina Bird Club)įour-letter codes are commonly (and too often incorrectly) used as a short-hand way to write a bird name.
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