Singapore Birds Database: A Digital Museum of Local Bird Information

The Singapore Birds Project introduces a comprehensive digital database that tracks rare bird sightings across the island. This searchable digital museum features over 1,000 records for more than 160 species, providing birdwatchers with a centralized resource to verify historical occurrences and contribute their own observations of uncommon local avian visitors.

~Record keeping with the future in mind~ Summary The Singapore Birds Database contains an easy-to-use search interface that allows you to look up information on locally rare bird species More than 1000 records across over 160 species are now freely available to the public You can contribute to our project by completing this simple form if you encounter any rare birds Feel free to contact us via the Singapore Birds Project regarding any feedback or suggestions If you need help with identification, don’t hesitate to ask on our Facebook group where many regionally experienced birdwatchers are present To find out more about our philosophy and objectives of this database, check out this write-up Basic questions but who has the answers? A Digital Museum. Quite a catchy name, isn’t it? Now that we have grabbed your attention, here are some simple questions that we want to ask you: How many times has the Fairy Pitta been recorded in Singapore? The answer is twice. Easy, right! It’s been all over the news recently. Okay then, what about Chinese Blue Flycatcher? Hmm, there were some recent records but it’s difficult to be certain of the total count. Two? Three? The answer is four. Well, what about the Northern Boobook? Now that’s a tough one. Does anyone have this information at their fingertips…? A rather basic piece of information, it seems—just how many times a species has been seen. Yet no one appears to have the answer. From left: Fairy Pitta Pitta nympha, Chinese Blue Flycatcher Cyornis glaucicomans, and Northern Boobook Ninox japonica To find out more, let’s check what Singapore Birds Project has to say about the Northern Boobook. Local Status: Uncommon migrant Location: Records from Tuas South, Pasir Ris Park, and Satay by the Bay but could conceivably occur in any place with trees. This gives us some rough ideas about the species. It certainly is not a common bird, so maybe less than 20 records in total? Still we’d like to know more details. After all, it is still a highly sought after species—knowing where and when to look for it provides clues on the best way to find an individual. Searching eBird is not particularly effective either. There are a large number of data points with some being repeats of the same sighting, and it would be too time consuming to click through every point on the map. Map of Northern Boobook sightings on eBird Finding the answer to this seemingly simple question is actually rather difficult. One would first need to make an excel spreadsheet, click through every eBird data point, then collapse possibly duplicated sightings…and that’s not all. To obtain pre-eBird era information, there would also be a need to flip through old literature to tabulate all records. This used to be the convoluted journey that any curious birdwatcher had to take to learn about most species, but that will no longer be the case. Introducing the Singapore Birds Database Using our newly launched Singapore Birds Database, you can get your answer in just a few clicks. All you need to do is to search for a species name, and voila! We can see that there are at least 16 confirmed local records of the Northern Boobook. How easy is that?! The Singapore Birds Database contains local records of over 160 species of rare birds. Not only are details on the dates, location and species name of sightings included, we also provide links to primary sources (if available online) such as Facebook or scientific publications so that anybody can verify the data for themselves. For cases where there are records of a rarity at the same (or nearby) location after a period of absence, if we think that multiple records refer to the same individual, we provide internal links so that users can cross-reference the records. A search of Northern Boobook in the Singapore Birds Database How the Singapore Birds Database was conceptualised In 2019/2020, we had a tremendous migration season with vagrants such as a Fairy Pitta, Daurian Redstarts, and Taiga Flycatchers showing up. It was quite extraordinary and we worked to publish about its peculiarity together with Singapore’s eBird reviewer, Martin Kennewell. Researching for our paper was very challenging because basic information about a species in Singapore (e.g. how many times has it been seen) was not readily available. We thought to ourselves, why not create a database to address this problem? In January 2020, we decided to embark on a massive project to compile all records of significant bird species in Singapore. And let’s not just compile it for personal use. Let’s make it public. Let’s make it comprehensive. Let’s make it easy to use. Let’s make sure that it is regularly updated. Let’s make it free to use. And most importantly, let’s make it transparent. We aim for this database to provide records, substantiated with primary evidence, such that users can also question and independently arrive at answers themselves. We reviewed over 1000 records manually by checking through every...