Category: Submit observations

By using BirdRing you can submit your observations to researchers in a few different ways:

1. Upload to websites: BirdRing is connected to some major websites. By clicking the cloud icon in the home screen, BirdRing will send suitable observations to the right website. It does require that you have an account at that website. BirdRing will ask you to enter your account data (user name and password) and store them in the BirdRing settings.
2. By hand from your computer: search cr-birding.org how you can send your observation data. Very often it is an email address. In such cases you can attach the BirdRing CSV attachment. Some researchers can process the CSV (semi) automatically. That saves time for them and for you and it prevents possible errors while copying data by hand.

geese.org (geese and swans)
cr-birding submit (> 50 projects)
griel (for metal rings read in the Netherlands)

Other European websites can be connected as well. Contact me for the possibilities, if you own such a website.

CSV is short for Comma Separated Value. It is a common used format tu exchange data between different applications. You can view and edit a CSV file using Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheets of LibreOffice Calc. BirdRing uses a CSV file to send your observation data by email.

When you open the CSV file using Excel, it may happen that data are not formatted the right way. This is caused by regional settings in Windows, like Dutch. These settings doe not fit the international standard that is used by BirdRing in the CSV file.

There are several ways to overcome this issue. One is to use Google Spreadsheets to open the CSV file. Another is to adjust regional settings in Windows. You need to do that only once:

In Windows, start the Control Panel, and under “Clock, Language en Region” you choose “Change date, time or number formats”:

Now you see this window (or a regional variant):

Choose Additional Settings, then you see this:

In this window you must adjust three settings:

• Decimal symbol: . (point)
• Digit grouping symbol: , (comma)
• List separator: , (comma)

Finally click OK a few times.

N.B. These changes will be active in Excel, when you first close Excel and then restart Excel.

When BirdRing has sent observation data to connected websites, those observations are no longer shown in bold text but in normal text. Observations that after uploading (cloud) are still shown bold in the list, can’t be uploaded to a website. You must submit those observations from your computer. You can use the CSV attachment for easy access and forwarding observation data.

The upload status is also visible in the  CSV attachment that BirdRing can send by email. In the column “submittedToWebsite” you can see which observations have and which have not been uploaded by BirdRing.