Welcome BowerBird Community

BowerBird is a site very similar to iNaturalist from Australia with a very vibrant and knowledgeable community of naturalists. As part of the sad news about BowerBird shutting down, BB founder Ken Walker recommended that the community start using iNaturalist if they’d like to continue generating data for the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA archives research-quality observations from iNaturalist).

We’re honored by Ken’s recommendation and want to do everything we can to help any BowerBird community members who want to give iNaturalist a try get oriented as painlessly as possible.

I posted a brief tutorial aimed at explaining the basics of iNaturalist to a BowerBird user seeing the website for the first time.

BowerBird users reiner and @matthew_connors set up a very nice BowerBird Project on iNaturalist

And we’ve had requests from 12 BowerBird users to help copy over their BowerBird observations to their iNaturalist accounts. Over 12,000 such observations have been copied over so far.

iNaturalist can seem pretty hard to figure out for new users so I’m hopeful these steps will help increase the chance of a smooth transition. I’m also hoping this forum thread will be a place for any BowerBird users with questions to get feedback and help from the broader iNaturalist community. And also don’t hesitate to send any questions to help@inaturalist.org

Thanks and welcome BowerBird community!

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Welcome Bower Birders! I’m glad that you’re joining this wonderful iNaturalist community. As far as the forum is concerned, if you have any forum-related questions don’t hesitate to message myself or even better, @moderators, for assistance and we’ll be happy to help you out and get you comfortable here.

Happy observing!

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Hi @loarie,
I have only a few observations on BB, as I switched over to iNat a while ago. How should I go about moving those observations to iNat manually so that they’re added to the Bb Project with the hyperlink? Do I have to worry about potential duplicates between iNat and ALA? e.g. if observations are already on ALA, should they still be added to iNat? Thank you so much!

Hi Claudia, we’d be happy to copy over your BB observations if you email help@inaturalist.org to confirm. We haven’t received word from ALA about what they are doing about duplicates, but the BB link you mention has the information ALA needs to de-dup, which I imagine they’ll be able to do relatively easily.

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I just wanted to give an update on the BowerBird migration. To date 70% of the observations on BowerBird have made it over to iNaturalist at the request of 68 people. I think things seem to be tapering off.

These data represent 9.8k species and nearly 700 people have helped identify these observations (huge thanks to @gumnut, @vicfazio3, @bushbandit @thebeachcomber, @reiner et al!). The Bowerbird project gives a great overview of the BB community on iNat

While we have a policy against posting observations to iNaturalist not attached to active people, we made an exception for the late Graeme Cocks https://www.inaturalist.org/people/graemevc after his son and wife reached out and agreed to steward the observations on Graeme’s behalf. Its certainly fantastic to have Graeme’s wonderful contributions represented here.

I also mentioned the migration in the Australia post for the World Tour a few weeks ago in case anyone missed it:
https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/25726-australia-inaturalist-world-tour

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G’day Loarie;
It seems Bowerbird has finally bitten the dust. There are many links in iNat obs when these records were ported over. The links are now dead. However, Reiner loaded them all onto the wayback machine.
They can be accessed via a change to the link, eg,
https://web.archive.org/web/20190529010245/http://www.bowerbird.org.au/observations/71303
While the images are missing, it doesn’t matter as the images came over to iNat (if not, the links/obs don’t exist so irrelevant).
I’m wondering if it’s worth an automatic programming solution on the server side to change all the bowerbird links to have the Wayback machine link added?
The comments in there are gold, IMHO.
Here’s the current iNat obs of the imported Bowerbird obs above.
https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/observations/25658393#activity_comment_4272324
Cheers
Brett

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That might not work. It seems the “20190529010245” part of the link is a time/date stamp of when it was loaded, perhaps down to the millisec. So will be different for every link and so won’t work as a generic update to all links.

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A link like this will redirect you to the most recent copy: https://web.archive.org/web/http://www.bowerbird.org.au/observations/71303

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if it just involves appending “https://web.archive.org/web/” to the front of the existing “Bowerbird URL” observation field values that should be possible. Can folks confirm that that is what is wanted?

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Thanks Jeremy, that worked :-)
Is there any way for you to see if these links are used Loarie?
If they aren’t used, then may as well remove them & save space/resources.
Personally I’ve used them once in a blue moon to see a conversation to help work out id’s. Diagnostic info was often mentioned by experts, etc.
If there’s no usage data, I’d vote to add the “https://web.archive.org/web/” to the links to keep them available if it’s not to onerous. But I’m only one voice.
Cheers
Brett

Hello I had some time away from Bowerbird but on my return it had moved. I am wondering whether my old observations on it still exist and whether they could be migrated across still?
I think my old username was either Rivendell or Rivendel and I would have used either rivendel@bigpond.net.au or cmcintyre@rivendel.com.au (my current email).
Thank you for letting me know either way! Cheryl McIntyre

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Hi Cheryl,
The Bowerbird site unfortunately shut down a couple of years ago. A large number of observations were migrated to the ala.org.au though and a number of users moved their observations to iNaturalist.

I did a quick search at ALA with your name and it does look like you have observations there:
https://biocache.ala.org.au/occurrences/search?q=collector_text%3A"cheryl+mcintyre"

Are these all of your Bowerbird observations? I’m not sure about migrating to iNaturalist, one of the admins might know how. You can also copy the Bowerbird links listed in the ALA sightings into the wayback machine (prefix https://web.archive.org/ to the URL) to see an archived copy of the original, but I’m not sure if the actual photos have been saved…

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Yes, those are my original bowerbird sightings. Thank you very much for your reply. Cheryl