About
What's the big idea then?
Going Birding is a free, real-time, county-based bird news service. News can be submitted by any registered user (registration is free) and is instantly available to anybody via the web, email, and Twitter. The website is hosted on our servers but administration pages are available to county administrators (usually the County Recorder or members of the county bird club). There is a demo site where you can try it out, or take a look at the Hampshire site, the first county to be launched in 2009. There is no charge to the club or to end-users; our running costs are covered by advertising.
Features
There are two main audiences, local birders and local recorders.
For local birders
- Submit your news and no need to also send your records to the Recorder
- View any days news; sort by several criteria and filter by rarity level
- View any days news plotted on a Google Map
- Search the archive of news
- Export your records (by date range) to a CSV file
- View the list of species reported in the county during any year
- If the observer's profile settings allow, click a link to email the observer
- Get news sent to your email address (this could be email you can read on your mobile phone)
- Subscribe to the Twitter feed
- Upload photos
- Search the archive of photos
For local recorders
- Download the data to a CSV file whenever you like
- Define certain species as "confidential" so news won't be made public
- Define lists of species, sites and links
- Define which species will be alerted via email and Twitter
- Review the list of observer entered sites and "upgrade" them to official sites