I’m always happy when I can address problems found by users of Birdathon. By sending feedback, you help make this app better—you can send feedback directly in the app by tapping “Settings,” then “About Birdathon” and then tapping “Send Feedback” or you can just send an email directly to birdathon@voyageropen.com.

First off, I had missed the following birds in the Clements checklist, which is used as the basis for all checklists in Birdathon: Common Buzzard, Eastern Shrike-tit, Western Shrike-tit, Northern Shrike-tit, Olive-backed Forest Robin.

Next, if you had created a checklist in a version of Birdathon earlier than 1.5.1, and your checklist had all the birds from Clements v2019, you might have noticed that 277 of those birds ended up in the family “Uncategorized.” This is because Clements v2022 had a large number of changes, including lumps and splits. For version 1.5.2 I have resolved as many of these as I could by associating the lumped or changed bird names with the new names. For example, if you had Southern Caracara on your old list, it’s now an alias for Crested Caracara as it’s been lumped with that species.

I was able to recategorize all but 50 of those species changes. Splits, for example, can’t be easily resolved. For example, Greater Antillean Nightjar was split into Cuban Nightjar and Hispaniolan Nightjar. In that case, I just leave it as Greater Antillean Nightjar and move it to “Uncategorized Birds” to indicate you will need to research the bird to determine which species you observed and then change the name accordingly.

The last change in this version is that after exporting a Summary, you can now import the text file into a new checklist. There are limitations, as the only observation information exported is the count and the date of the first observation for each species. A new checklist created from a summary won’t have any location information, for example.

That’s it! You can update Birdathon by going to the App Store and clicking “Update”.