Originally Posted by
ArviLaanemets
I don't think having this option build into your DB will be very useful - having an option to check, is the bird sighted before will be probably enough.
But maybe you need a better preparing of your sighting tours? Of course I haven't a full overview not about how you register your sightings, nor what data you have really stored. E.g.
Are you registering repeated sightings of species in sighting tour, and when yes, then are you simply counting them, or you have a separate entry in whatever media (paper table, a table in tablet or laptop, whatever) you use in your field trip;
In your DB, have you registered also species you don't have any sightings jet;
Anyway, whatever media you use in your field trip (paper, text file, excel file, ...), my advice is have a new copy of this media at least for every new field trip. Then:
In this copy, you can register all trip-specific info once (start and end DATES of trip, and probably location information too);
When you use paper media, before you are going out, you can print out a list of all currently registered species in your DB. In case there may be species not sighted before, this list mus contain a column where is indicated, is given specie sighted before or not - otherwise all entries entered manually are probably for new species;
In case you use tablet or laptop, you can create a new copy of your registration table whenever you need this (a separate table for every day, or a separate table for different locations in this trip, etc.);
In case instead of simple text file on your tablet or laptop, you use something more sophisticated (e.g. Excel workbook), you can have there separate sheets with registers e.g. specie names, along with ID's for those names, families of those species, etc., and e.g. with Excel, you can simply select species from Data Validation List, instead typing some long text and probably making a lot of typing errors. Having in table where you register your sightings a field, where common name id is calculated based on species name you selected, the formula returns an error in case this name was not found - which will alert you about possible first sighting when you are entering data into your DB from this trip media later.