Organise your aviaries

Creating an aviary

Three routes lead to the same result. The add button at the top of the Aviaries page, the floating button at the bottom of the screen on mobile, and on a computer a more direct move: drag a bird onto an empty part of the board and an aviary is created there.

Every aviary carries a name, one of twelve colours, a size and a position. None of that is decoration: it is what will let you recognise the back row or the breeding shed at a glance.

The board mirrors your setup

On a computer, aviaries appear on a plan you can pan and zoom. Hovering over an aviary shows a preview of its occupants, species, breeds and sexes. The expand button opens the detail record with the full list of birds and pairs.

On mobile, that plan becomes a list. The same actions stay available through the menu, without drag and drop.

The board tools

Four commands live at the top of the page, and they earn their keep the day the board gets crowded.

Auto-organize tidies the visible aviaries into a grid, in name order, each sized according to what it holds. It is the move to make after creating six aviaries on the fly, when their layout no longer means anything.

Visibility hides the aviaries you do not want to see, one by one or all at once. Hidden aviaries stay reachable in the list, they are not deleted, and automatic tidying only arranges the visible ones: the two commands work together to focus on part of the aviary.

Zoom and panning let you follow a setup wider than the screen. Settings control display details, in particular the information shown when hovering over a bird.

Assigning a pair moves the whole pair

The left-hand panel lists birds and pairs with no aviary. You can search there by name or ring, then drag them to their destination.

One rule is worth knowing before you meet it: assigning a pair to an aviary moves all of its birds there. This is deliberate, breeding birds must stay physically together, and it avoids the absurd situation of a declared pair whose male is somewhere else.

Drag and drop is not the only path

Nothing forces you through the board. A bird’s form carries an Aviary field, a pair’s form does too, and an assignment made there shows on the board at once. It is often quicker at creation time: the bird lands in its aviary rather than in the unassigned column.

One case behaves differently, and it follows directly from the rule above. A bird engaged in a pair has no aviary of its own. Its form then replaces the dropdown with a card naming the pair, carrying its own selector: a change made there moves the whole pair. If the bird belongs to several pairs, a warning says so, because their aviaries stay in step.

Emptying is not deleting

An aviary’s “Empty” button sends its occupants back to the unassigned panel without touching their records. Deleting an aviary does the same before it disappears. In both cases, no bird and no pair is ever deleted by an operation on an aviary.

This organisation serves more than tidiness: from the Health page, a record can be assigned to a whole aviary, which is the right scale for a disinfection or a group treatment.