Record your first birds

Filling in the form, field by field

From the Birds page, the add button opens the form. Species, breed, sex, ring number, status and date of birth make up the required base. If you only know the year, switch the date field to year-only entry rather than inventing a day.

Sex can stay unknown. That is the normal case after a hatch, and the record will later offer “Male” and “Female” as quick actions, in a single click, without reopening the form.

The ring number is the main identifier

The field is entirely free, and that is deliberate: every federation has its own format. Type the number exactly as engraved, whether it looks like “2345/26”, “BPC PR 503 105” or “ABS-KJ-24-042”.

The only rule is uniqueness per species within your farm. Get into the habit of a consistent format from your first entries: it is what will later make your searches and sorting reliable.

Where the bird comes from

The source is chosen on the record: born in the aviary, purchase, gift, loan or exchange. Depending on that choice, fields appear for the price, the seller, the address or the description of the exchange.

This is not paperwork. The purchase price feeds the acquisition cost that will appear in your financial analysis, with nothing to re-enter anywhere else.

Declaring its parents without leaving the record

Further down the form, the pedigree section asks where the bird comes from: “No parent pair”, with an optional father and mother one at a time; or classic pair, polygamous group, complex group. The choice is not trivial, it decides how certain the parentage is, and the “Pair your birds” step returns to it in detail.

As soon as one of the three modes is chosen, a switch offers to create the parent pair right here. The sub-form carries the essentials of the pair form: breeding birds, name, formation date, status, aviary and breeding pen. And as in the pair form, a breeding bird not yet in the aviary is created from the search field, without losing what you have typed.

This is the natural path when you record a young bird hatched at home while its parents are not yet paired on screen. You do not have to leave the form, nor come back later to attach the bird to its pair.

You are taking over an existing flock

Entering sixty birds one by one is not compulsory. The bulk entry form first sets the shared values, species, breed, sex, then lets you personalise each line, typically the ring and the name. Each line duplicates at the press of a button, which saves retyping a whole brood.

Start with the breeding birds. They are the ones you will need at the pairing step, and the rest of the flock can be entered over the following days.

Status matters more than it looks

Seven statuses are provided, and each has a precise effect.

The last five share one thing: they remove the bird from the count of birds present. It stays in the database, in the history and in the pedigree, where its offspring goes on existing. That is why changing a status is almost always better than deleting a record.

The revenue from a sale flows into your finances on its own: there is nothing to re-enter anywhere else.

Your own statuses are read as “active”

You can create as many statuses as you like, with their colour and their icon: in quarantine, reserved, recovering, for sale, whatever your farm calls for.

One rule is worth knowing before you create them. The app only recognises five statuses as absent: sold, loaned, given, deceased and lost. Any other status, inactive included, like the ones you invent, is treated as a bird present in the aviary. A bird moved to “in quarantine” or “reserved” therefore keeps counting in your flock, keeps appearing in pick lists and keeps entering your statistics.

This is neither a flaw nor a limit, as long as you know it: a custom status qualifies a bird you still have, it does not take one out of the aviary.

Label rather than multiply statuses

A bird has one status at a time, and that status has consequences throughout the software. When all you want is to mark something, “for sale”, “keep an eye on it”, “Marcel’s line”, use a label instead.

A bird carries up to twenty of them, each with its colour. They show as chips on the card and on the record, can be filtered in the list, and appear in your exports and in the flock breakdown. None exists at the start: you create yours in Configuration, or on the fly from a bird’s record by typing the name you want.

Deleting a label touches no bird, it is simply removed from those carrying it, and the confirmation tells you how many they are.

Acting on several birds at once

The “Select” button, next to the view switcher, places a checkbox on every bird. Tick the ones you care about, or take everything the filter lets through, and the top bar then offers to change their status, add or remove a label, mark them as favourites or delete them.

The same bar offers “Add to a competition”: the ticked birds join, in one go, the results of an exhibition, or of a race if they are pigeons. The step “Prepare an exhibition or a pigeon race” covers it in detail.

Three things are worth knowing. The selection follows you if you move from the grid to the table along the way. One operation covers at most two hundred birds. And sold, loaned and given are absent from the bulk status change: they call for a buyer, a price and a date specific to each bird, which are entered in the form.

On a single bird’s record the same moves are at hand: the buttons at the top change the status and apply a label without opening the form.

A deletion can be undone

Deleting a bird, from its record, its menu or a selection, no longer asks for confirmation: it goes straight to the bin. A message appears at the top right of the screen, “… is in the bin”, with an “Undo” button. One click within ten seconds and the bird is back in its place as if nothing had happened. A bulk deletion shows a single message giving the number of items, and its “Undo” brings them all back.

This safety net matters most during your first entries: a record created twice, a ring misread, a test to discover the form. It works the same way in all eight modules, birds, aviaries, pairs, clutches, health records, expenses, shows and races, and for the photo on a record.

The bin keeps everything for 30 days

Once the message is gone, nothing is lost. On a computer, the bin is the red icon in the bottom bar, next to the notification bell, and a grey badge on it counts what it holds. It opens as a drawer on the right of the screen, newest first: each line says what was deleted, when, and in how many days the deletion becomes permanent. On mobile it has its own page, opened from an icon in the header as soon as it holds something.

“Restore” puts the item back where it was. The red icon next to it deletes it permanently, and “Empty bin” clears everything at once: those two moves cannot be undone, and they are the only ones that ask for confirmation. If you do nothing, an item is permanently deleted after 30 days.

Whatever leaves with an item comes back with it. A pair takes its clutches with it, as its line says (“with 1 clutch”), a show its results. And while a bird is in the bin, it remains a member of its pairs and the parent of its young, on whose records it appears greyed out, “In the bin”, with its own “Restore” button.

A permanent deletion, for its part, announces what it takes with it: the confirmation counts the exhibition or race results that will go with the item, the young that will lose a parent, the health records that will lose their target. A pair deleted for good leaves its young the parents it made it possible to identify, and its clutches remain, without a pair. A bird deleted permanently stays named, struck through, on its family’s records.

One consequence is worth knowing right away: its ring stays reserved. You cannot create another bird of the same species with the same number while the first one is in the bin. Restore it, or delete it permanently to free the ring; the app offers to do so by itself if you try to reuse it.