Prepare and follow an exhibition

Creating the exhibition

Name, date, place, exhibition type and number of birds entered are enough to open the record. Exhibition types can be customised from the Configuration page, with their name, icon and colour, and the ones shipped by default can be edited or disabled.

Creating the exhibition before the show rather than after has a practical advantage: the record then serves as the entry list, leaving only the scores to fill in on your return.

Recording the results

Every bird shown gets a result. Linking it to a bird from your aviary pre-fills the breed, the colour and the sex, and attaches the result to its record. A bird that is not yours can also be entered by hand.

The age category works itself out: a bird born in the year of the exhibition is classed as young, the others as adults, and manual correction stays possible for edge cases. The score is entered in the show’s own scale, whatever it is, with no conversion.

Starting from the bird rather than the exhibition

A bird’s record also carries the recording of a result, which saves opening the Results page for a single bird. The exhibition is looked up there by name, and if it does not exist yet, the form switches to creation: name, date, place, type and number of birds entered are all filled in on the spot, then the score is recorded straight after.

This is the path for coming home from a show, when you go through your birds one by one and the catalogue is still on the table.

Following the results entry

The list does more than archive: each card carries a progress bar, the number of birds entered and the number of scores already recorded. An upcoming exhibition stays at zero, one whose results are all recorded shows one hundred per cent.

That is what makes it worth creating the exhibition before the show rather than after. The record first serves as an entry list, then as a data entry list on your return, and the bar tells you what is left to copy from the catalogue.

What the record gives back

The detail record shows the number of birds, the results already recorded, the progress and the average score. Charts break your birds down by breed, by sex and by age category, and show the spread of scores. A ranking sorts the whole.

The real value shows elsewhere. A bird’s results appear in its history, and as coloured badges in the pedigree tree. A line that scores well becomes visible as a line, which no show catalogue can show.

After a few seasons

The Statistics page, in the Premium and Pro plans, sets your successive exhibitions side by side: how scores move over time, results by breed, by type, by place and by sex.

It is the last link in the chain that began with the configuration of your species. The birds entered, the pairs formed, the clutches followed and the shows recorded end up answering the only question that truly matters to a keeper: is what I am doing producing anything.