Getting Your Own Checklists Into Birder’s Diary Mobile

Creating Your Own Checklists Manually

If you have your own personal checklists that you would like to make available for your Birder’s Diary Mobile App for Android, create a text file containing the Common Name and Scientific Name of each species (in Taxonomic order) on separate lines.

For example, the beginning of the Mammals of MX file would look like the following.

“Derby’s Woolly Opossum”,”Caluromys derbianus”
“Water Opossum”,”Chironectes minimus”
“Common Opossum”,”Didelphis marsupialis”
“Virginia Opossum”,”Didelphis virginiana”
“Mexican Mouse Opossum”,”Marmosa mexicana”
“Brown Four-eyed Opossum”,”Metachirus nudicaudatus”
“Gray Four-eyed Opossum”,”Philander opossum”
“Gray Mouse Opossum”,”Tlacuatzin canescens”
“West Indian Manatee”,”Trichechus manatus”
:    :    :    :    :

 Be sure to enclose each name in double-quotes, and separate the common name from the scientific name with a comma, as shown above.

As of Birder’s Diary Mobile v1.32, you can also supply Abundance data to each line as the third element of each row. This element is optional.

  • The third element is a string of single digits (e.g. “0123456789”).
  • Each digit represents the magnitude of a bar in a bar chart to be displayed in Sightings Entry on the App.
  • Working with 4 digits (quarters), 12 digits (months), or 52 digits (weeks of the year) are common counts. However you can supply as many as you like and they will be averaged over an entire year’s graph.
  • Non-digit characters will be ignored and result in a bar of zero height.

For example, the following import file will result in the following graph being displayed.

Abert’s Squirrel,,0246
Black Bear,,123456789876
Red Fox,,111122223333444455556666777788889999000099998888
Bobcat,,1111aaaa3333444455556666777788889999000099998888
Mule Deer,,
Elk

Move this file to your Android device per the instructions below.

Creating Your Checklist from Data in Birder’s Diary Desktop

If you have your taxonomic list already in Birder’s Diary Desktop, then you can export it for inclusion into the Mobile App via the following:

  1. Open Birder’s Diary Desktop
  2. Choose File | Import/Export…
  3. Select the Checklists Tab
  4. Fill out as you see below. Be sure to check the Export for Mobile App Use checkbox

NOTE: The above feature is only available in version 5.1.80 and later.

Moving Your Checklist File Into Birder’s Diary Mobile Local Storage

  1. Connect your Android device with Birder’s Diary Mobile installed to your PC with a USB Cable.
  2. Open Windows File Explorer (WinKey+E)
  3. Navigate to where your CSV file is that you want to move to the Birder’s Diary Mobile App and import.
  4. Right-click on the CSV file and choose “Copy…” from the dropdown.
  5. Now navigate to your Android Device in Windows File Explorer and click on it to open.
    1. NOTE: Different Android Devices will show up differently and present different paths
    2. NOTE: To find out the exact path to copy your file to, open Birder’s Diary Mobile v1.14 or later and click on the Download Checklists button. Then use the Menu on that page to Show Local Storage Path for your device.

      This can show up, for example, as Storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.birdersdiary.mobile/files.
      But, in Windows File Explorer, for example with my Galaxy S9+, it shows up as       Computer\Galaxy S9+\Phone\Android\data\com.birdersdiary.mobile\files.
      The common part is \Android\data\com.birdersdiary.mobile\files.
  6. Navigate to (see above NOTEs) \Android\data\com.birdersdiary.mobile\files in Windows File Explorer under your Android device’s root note.
  7. Now Paste your CSV file from #4 above into this directory.

Importing Your Checklist File Into Birder’s Diary Mobile’s Database for Use

Now that you have your CSV Checklist file located on your devices local storage for Birder’s Diary Mobile, do the following to import the data into your database for use.

  1. Start your Birder’s Diary Mobile App on your Android Device
  2. Click on the Download Checklists button
  3. Select the OTHER CHECKLISTS Tab
  4. You will see all your local files at the top of the list of checklists to download
  5. Click the button to the right of the checklist you want to import to import it into your database.
  6. After loading in your database, you will be prompted to remove the file from local storage. It is recommended you do this. As you don’t need the file anymore, since the data is now in your database and ready for use.