Birders; how do you mark your sightings in your field guide when there's no checklist?

I don’t write much in my bird guides aside from the checklists at the back to keep them as clean as possible. While this has worked for my North American bird guides, I also have Princeton field guides for two other regions I’ve birded (South Asia and Central America), and these don’t have checklists at the back, so I’ll probably have to write on the bird pages themselves to record my sightings. Birders with similar field guides, what’s the “proper practice” for recording sightings in guides like these?

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You mean making “life list” of species seen? Doesn’t your guide have alphabetic index of species covered in the book? I use this index in my book to make small dots by the species I have seen or heard.

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I would double the dot idea. I also liked putting a small date to note when I saw it. These days though, I honestly just use eBird for keeping track of all that stuff. To tell the truth, I don’t even own a paper bird guide anymore though.

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There are a number of “birds of the world list” .csv files available through various taxonomic authorities (AOS, etc.) that you can download and keep digital copies of your life list so that your field guides can remain unmarked if that’s your preference. This comes with the added flexibility of being able to add in dates when you first see them as @empid suggested, and you can always tailor them to your liking.

I’ll second eBird as a good option for keeping lists.

I have my lifelist in a few different places in case I lose one. I write in my Sibley’s field guide which has a lot of extra space so it doesn’t seem crowded. The pages are divided into two vertical sections (columns) with one species each. I put a star next to the name at the top of the page and write date and location at the bottom of the page below the map for that species. I also put my lifelist data on a spreadsheet on my laptop and in a post on the BirdForum.Net lifelist/yearlist subforum. Those two are numbered unlike the info in my field guide. So I can tell you what was species #100 or #233 or what have you.

The danger of keeping your only life-list in a field guide is that if you loose that guide then all your lists are lost. This has happened to several people I know.
So I second what others have said and suggest that you keep your life list, and other bird records, on eBird.
I’m of the generation who hates writing in a book but I do sometimes break the rule. With some of the earlier field guides to SE Asia, there was no indication of distribution next to the plates, so I wrote in those species that were found in the country I was visiting (e.g. Viet Nam) - this cut down the number of “possible” to look for.

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I post all my bird observations on eBird, it produces handy, searchable lists of all the dates and locations of sightings of a species. In fact I got lured into eBird by the need of having a convenient life list on the phone in my pocket I can look up from anywhere. The other benefit of eBird (and the associated Merlin app) is that they have fairly global coverage and can provide lists of all the expected species at any time of the year and at any location on the planet. Both apps as well as the regional packages are free to download and use, and they are my go to reference in the field next to Sibley.

I have no proper birding expereinces, but I take a notebook, pen and camera with me and when I observe a bird I write their physical description like approx size, design of wings way of flying, flying high or flying low, fly fast or flying slow, the time of the day, making any sound while flying, or if bird is on the ground then details goes like colour of bird, is it in groups or not?, behaviour of bird(like some birds are agressive , like they don’t wanna get disturbed , and some birds are very shy they hide in their in canopies and make sounds, so their voices are only visible) like this list goes on and on. I take photos of birds before so that I can ask my friends what species is this. I don’t know about birding guides a lot as they are quite expensive for me, But I think for me a notebook and pen does a perfect job.

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Hey everyone, thanks for all the advice! I do have an eBird account that I regularly update with new checklists and consider my “ultimate” life list; however, I do also like to record my sightings in the bird guides. My field guides don’t have an exact list of all the species; they simply list the names and scientific names separately in the table of contents. I guess I’ll simply add a dot to the bird entries on the image pages.

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