My personal record of birds seen and photographed in the wild currently totals around 890 species. Not only do I want to ensure that all of those species are correctly identified and named, but I also need a robust cataloguing system for organising the thousands of photos within my Lightroom (Lr) library module. All my photos are stored by year and location, so to quickly access images of a given species I must rely on a well organised keyword system and, for me, the most sensible and logical way of achieving this is to put related keywords into defined categories. That's all well and good all the time the system is of a manageable size, but as the list of species grows and more categories, which are effectively groups of similar species, are needed, better organisation is required. I was at that stage a few years ago and knew that I had to completely restructure my keyword lists before the whole system became a mess. Birds were my priority because, although I was going to have to carry out a similar exercise with my animal keywords, the list of bird species together with associated references was already very large. A good hierarchical filing system was needed where related species could be grouped together with similar groups, or families, all under as few primary categories as possible. The system needed to be structured to roughly follow the normal systematic order for listing bird species, so I knew that I would have to broaden my knowledge.

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It was all a bit of a mystery at the outset, but the more I delved into the world of avian taxonomy the more it started to make sense, to the point that I now feel I have a reasonable understanding of the subject. The biggest problem I found wasn't to do with the naming of species, but with the classification system itself as I couldn't find two bird lists that agreed with each other. I found that quite frustrating as the systematics and classification was just as important as the nomenclature. In the end I had so many notes that I decided to write a couple of articles - the first was 'understanding bird orders and families', which was followed up with an accompanying piece entitled 'understanding taxonomy listings'. They were on my original website, but as both documents are still relevant to some degree I've made them available at the bottom of this page.  

The exercise helped me develop a very workable Lr keyword system. A system that's been slowly developed and adapted over the last few years as I've encountered new species. It currently has 26 primary bird groups, many of which are broken down into various subgroups. Whilst there are far too many of these associated subgroups and nested keywords to list on a web page like this, I have confirmed all the primary groups for reference purposes.

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However, whilst my Lightroom keyword system works for finding photos of a given species, my personal 'World Bird List', that I regularly update, requires a different approach. The system that works for me is an 'excel workbook' that is split into eight spreadsheets (categories) for 'waterfowl', 'waterbirds', 'shorebirds', 'seabirds', 'raptors & owls', 'miscellaneous', 'exotic birds' and 'passerines'. Each species is listed under its family group by taxonomic order and family and, if appropriate, subfamily and tribe. The species is identified by both its common and scientific name, and its trinomal subspecies name if defined. If the species is categorised as 'threatened' on the IUCN Red List I have marked it accordingly. The list also shows the country where each species or subspecies has been photographed.

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Whilst the buttons on the right will take you directly down the page to that particular section, it makes sense to start with the systematic ordering of species, which is classification.

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