Create your account and set up your aviary

An assistant takes you through it on first sign-in

Creating the account takes an email address and a password. On your first sign-in, a setup assistant opens: your name, your aviary’s name, your regional settings, then your species, breeds and colours.

Steps that are not essential can be skipped and picked up later. The one about species deserves your attention instead, and the rest of this page explains why.

A species is not a label, it is a set of rules

In AviarySoft, a species carries the biological settings that later let the app do the work for you. They live in Configuration, Species tab, by opening the species record.

Setting	What it holds	What it drives
Incubation time	21 days by default	The expected hatch date
Clutch size	Optional	The pre-filled quantity of a new laying record
Days between eggs	Optional	How long the clutch takes to build up
Start of brooding	Complete clutch, or an egg number	The date incubation actually starts
Banding age	Optional	The banding reminder after hatching

The three middle settings are recent, and they are the ones that change the most. They answer a question breeding software rarely asks, although it decides everything else.

From which egg does the female start brooding?

A female does not necessarily brood the day she lays. Between the first egg and the real start of incubation, a day or two weeks may pass, and it is that gap, not the laying date, that determines the hatch date.

Three patterns exist, and the Start of brooding field expresses all three.

Early brooding. The female settles from the first or second egg and keeps laying while she broods. Each egg starts its incubation on its own date, and the chicks hatch spread out. Setting: from egg no. 1 or no. 2.

Intermediate brooding. The female starts mid-clutch, around the third egg. The first hatches are grouped, the last ones lag behind. Setting: from egg no. 3.

Brooding once the clutch is complete. The female builds up her clutch without brooding it, then settles once the last egg is laid. Every egg starts together and they hatch together. Mechanically, this is also the pattern of any egg placed in an incubator. Setting: when the clutch is complete.

The help text under the field gives the reference points the app uses for the species it ships, and the call is yours for your own birds: you know them better than a default value, and the field can be corrected at any time.

The species shipped by default already come configured: two eggs two days apart with brooding from the second for pigeons, twelve eggs one day apart with brooding once the clutch is complete for chickens and quail, ten for ducks, six two days apart for geese.

One entry is an exception, and deliberately so: “Exotic birds” gathers birds whose laying rhythms have nothing in common. No default value would be right for everyone. If you keep one of them, create it as a species in its own right and give it its own settings.

What these settings actually produce

Here is the calculation, in three steps:

The rank is capped by the actual clutch: a species set to the third egg that lays only two starts on the last one laid, for want of a third. And “when the clutch is complete” comes down to taking the real quantity as the trigger rank.

Three examples, using the settings shipped by default:

Species	Settings shipped	1st egg laid	Last egg	Start of brooding	Expected hatch
Pigeons, 2 eggs	2 days apart, from egg 2, 18 days	1 April	3 April	3 April	21 April
Geese, 6 eggs	2 days apart, complete clutch, 30 days	1 April	11 April	11 April	11 May
Chickens, 12 eggs	1 day apart, complete clutch, 21 days	1 April	12 April	12 April	3 May

For chickens, the gap between the laying date and the hatch date reaches thirty-two days, eleven of which are the clutch building up. Without this setting, the app would announce a hatch eleven days too early.

What you will see when recording a clutch

As soon as a species has a laying rhythm, its laying form changes shape, which you will meet again in the step about clutches:

• the date field reads 1st egg date rather than simply date;
• a Start of brooding field appears, pre-filled by the calculation above and editable;
• the quantity arrives pre-filled with the declared clutch size, editable too.

That editable field is not a token precaution. Two common practices escape any per-species calculation: removing eggs and replacing them with dummies, which deliberately synchronises the hatches, and using an incubator, where everything starts on the same day. In both cases you correct the date and the calculation steps aside.

How the ring number is entered

The ring number stays a free identifier, because every federation engraves its own way. The species record lets you pick the entry format that matches your rings, and that choice only affects typing comfort.

Number then year splits the field in two. The current year arrives pre-filled, leaving you only the number to type. This suits rings whose year closes the engraving.

Free field shows a single box, where you copy the engraving as it is. Choose it if your rings carry their year somewhere other than at the end, or carry none at all.

A third setting, ring colour by year, shows the number on the colour of the year of birth, as on the real ring. The table arrives pre-filled with the COM six-year cycle, and every line can be changed, since racing pigeons and poultry follow other sequences.

Your existing rings never change when you touch these settings, and they can be changed at any time, species by species.

Breeds and colours: start small

Every species has its own breeds and its own colours or mutations. The temptation is to enter everything at once, including what you hope to keep one day.

Do the opposite: declare what is in your aviary today. Adding a breed takes ten seconds the day the first bird of that breed arrives, whereas a list of forty breeds of which three are used slows down every entry for years.

What you can change later, and what resists

Almost everything can be changed afterwards: species, breeds, colours, statuses, health record types, exhibition types, expense categories.

Two limits are worth knowing now. Items marked “System”, the species and statuses shipped by default, cannot be deleted; they can be disabled, which removes them from the pick lists without touching the data already using them. And a breed or a colour used by a bird can no longer be deleted while that bird exists, which is a safeguard rather than a nuisance.

The configuration is stored on the server and follows your devices. What you set on the computer is there on the phone.