This is my second review this week of an online service for birdwatchers. You can read the other review about birdpost.com. In this posting I’m going to try and keep this to a review of Birdstack.com and avoid doing a comparison of the two sites. That will have to wait for a third article.

Birdstack.com presents its home page as being pretty basic in appearance; a bit of a jumble of plain looking text and some images. At first it all looks a bit old fashioned and amateurish, which is a shame because behind the front page is some great functionality.

Once you’ve signed up, which requires the usual email activation, you then have access to your "dashboard". From here you have links to all the features of the site, such as adding observations, your locations (where you’ve seen the birds) and your lists. You can also see how many birding friends you have, the trips you’ve recorded, your tag cloud and a table of all your sightings. Again the layout is pretty minimalist with very little in the way of frills – which might be good for people on dial-up or accessing the site on a mobile device.

Adding a sighting is first a question of adding the location you saw the bird. This form allows  you to name the location before entering its geographical details. After these there’s a Google map of the world, if you enter a town that the system recognizes it will place he marker in the right spot on the map, which is cool. However, if it doesn’t recognize your particular neck of the woods you’ll have to find the correct latitude and longitude and enter these into the form. (BTW There’s a good site for doing this at http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html. Below this there’s some optional information such as elevation and an ecological region classification.

Once you’ve added your location (which you only have to do once) you then select the species seen. This is a neat feature; as you type in the species name the system does a look-up on the complete world list of birds and will prompt you with similar spelled names and their geographical breeding region. Just click the correct species and away you go. You can enter part of the middle of the bird’s name and it will still be able to find the species.

Once the species is selected you can then enter:

• The location (you can add a new location at this point if you want)
• Date seen
• The trip name if this sighting was made on a specific trip
• The time of observation
• Number seen, broken down by gender and age if you desire
• Tags
• Any link to other related information
• Notes

 You can also mark the observation private if you don’t want it published before finally clicking to save the observation.

Once you’ve entered your observations you’ll want some way of reporting them and, for me, this is where Birdstack.com really excels with its comprehensive listing  functionality. You can build lists from any of the parameters you use when creating sites or entering an observation. For example I have a County Cork list which is composed of:

• Any observations with Co. Cork set as the County
• Any observations with Cork set as the County
• Any observations with Cork set as the City

I could also create a Cork City list that just pulled in the latter observations.

I’ve created a year list for all observations seen in 2010 and tags can be used too, so any sighting with a "Garden" tag appears on my Garden list. You can also create your list to show all observations, the first observation of each species (for location and year lists for example) or the most recent sighting of each species for recently seen lists. These features give me the flexibility to list my sightings just the way I want and I’ve not yet found any list type I couldn’t create.

The features of this site don’t stop there. There are Forums, Events and Friends features for socialization; but what’s neatest is the ability to turn any list into a Bird Stack. This is similar to a widget and can be used to display the last n sightings on another web site. Here’s a Bird Stack for all my observations:

 With all these great features why didn’t the site rate 5 stars? As I mentioned above, the look of the site is a bit drab and uninteresting despite the great functions; but the biggest drawback for me is the lack of pictures of the bird species. There are no photos attached to the birds at all and no way members can upload their own photographs. I think this is a great pity as I love to see a thumbnail of the birds I’ve seen next to the observation. That was enough to knock a star off the site rating.

To sum up Birdstack.com is a great site for birders with lots of great functionality and a superb listing feature. Performance is good, the only thing missing are some photos of the birds.