While I don’t remember the Birdwatcher’s Digest article that Shai refers to, there was an article in N.A Bird Bander from 1978 which proposed a four letter code pretty much like the one used today. https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/nabb/v003n01/p0016-p0025.pdf
I also remember a stretch of time when the ABA tried assigning a (3 digit?) number to each species. Mike Cooper Ridge Sent from my iPhone > On Apr 23, 2021, at 9:15 AM, Shaibal Mitra <shaibal.mi...@csi.cuny.edu> wrote: > > When Rich posted yesterday, I was anxiously awaiting any news at all from > him and read it immediately on the basis of the sender's name, regardless of > the subject line. I and many others appreciated his efforts to re-find the > Violent Green Swallow in the cold and wind. That said, the "RWSW" in the > subject line caught my eye. I haven't seen that code since I finally tore > myself away from it in the late 80s or 90s, but my old childhood notebooks > contain many such entries, prior to the standardization of four-letter codes > and the splitting of the Rough-winged Swallow complex into several species, > including our NRWS. I'm guessing that Rich's use of codes goes back at least > that far, and that his typo dates him to the earliest years of this > expedience. > > I vividly remember my first exposure to the idea of four-letter codes for > birds: an article in Bird Watcher's Digest around 1981. I thought it was a > great idea and adopted it in my own notes immediately. My early notebooks > need a little tlc to interpret: my "BWWA" meant Black-and-white Warbler, a > super-familiar species that nested behind my house, rather than Blue-winged > Warbler, which took me a couple of years to find in its much lower numbers > and more localized breeding sites within biking distance of my house. When I > finally found my first Blue-winged Warblers in the Great Swamp, I realized I > had a problem. Ditto for my discovery of a colony of Bank Swallows at the > Plains Road super fund site, which was accomplished only after a couple of > notebooks were filled with "BASW," referring to the ubiquitous, chirpy, > long-tailed one. > > Anyway, I'd like to commend the use of four-letter codes, not just for > note-taking, but for efficiently navigating eBird. Standard codes work in > eBird for any search at the species level, and, in certain kinds of > navigation, down to subspecies level, for those that have codes assigned > (e.g. searching media for "YPWA" brings up photos and recordings of Yellow > Palm Warbler). This last observation reminds me of a significant and largely > under-appreciated virtue of four-letter codes. Fluency in them will teach you > a lot about taxonomy and field-identifiability at the subspecies and > superspecies levels. Subspecies that have been assigned codes are those that > are distinctive enough that banders are expected to be able to distinguish > and record them as such. So why not birders, too? In fact, many of the codes > that were initially applied to distinctive subspecies, such as "ETTI" (vs. > Black-crested Titmouse), have since been split. In other cases, it was > enlightening to learn that I wasn't supposed to use "WIFL" when banding the > locally common breeding Empid, because of difficulties in distinguishing it > from "ALFL" i -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/nysbirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birding.aba.org/maillist/NY01 Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
