About Custom Rarity
Birdathon gives you the ability to create your own checklist templates. These templates usually contain just a simple list of bird common names and Birdathon takes care of other details such as the taxonomic ordering, scientific name and ABA Rarity. But sometimes you might want to have your own rarity designation. Often local checklists will give a Rarity that is specific to a county or a location, such as the Santa Clara County, California checklist.
You can create and import checklists containing Custom Rarities, or you can set the Custom Rarity in your existing checklists (and later create templates using them).
Usually you assign higher numbers to rarer birds, but really you can use the field any way you like. Here’s a typical rating system:
1 = common, always seen in habitat in season
2 = fairly common, usually in habitat in season, but missed sometimes
3 = uncommon, always around, but sometimes you can't find
4 = rare, occurs yearly in the county, but not always in same places
5 = very rare, does not occur every year
6 = casual or vagrant, generally fewer than 10 records
If you would like to hand-create your own checklist templates containing Custom Rarity for yourself or to share with others, all you need to do is create a .csv file with three fields: Common Name, Is_A_Bird, and Rarity. For example, here's a minimalist list containing rarities:
Name,Is_A_Bird,Rarity
Mallard,1,1
Black Phoebe,1,2
Zone-tailed Hawk,1,6
Try importing Minimalist.csv into Birdathon to see this in action (see the instructions for importing if you're not sure how).
Creating a file with those entries and importing into Birdathon would give you a checklist with three species with Custom Rarities of 1, 2 and 6 respectively.
The "Is_A_Bird" field is used in case you want to make a checklist template with non-bird items (such as butterflies or mammals); non-birds are 0 and birds are 1.
The allowed values for Custom Rarity are 1 through 6. If you put in a higher number, it will get sorted under “Rarity 7 and Higher”.
Setting the Custom Rarity In the App
Inside any checklist, you can assign a custom rarity to a species.
Set the Custom Rarity for a bird by tapping on the bird name to go into the detail view, then tapping the button directly under the bird name near the center top of the view.
Once a list contains any birds with Custom Rarity, it can then be sorted by Custom Rarity via the Checklist Sort Style menu:
Birds without Custom Rarity set will show up at the end of the list under "Uncategorized."
Any checklist templates you create based on your list will inherit the Custom Rarities you set.