Generally, the reports on our main Bird News Extra page are presented in time order, with the newest report first. However, this may not always be the best way to see it. If you were planning a weekend trip wouldn't it be useful to group all the reports from each site together so you can see which places are 'hot' at the moment? Or wouldn't it be handy if all the sightings from your county appeared together so you didn't have to pick through the whole list? And what about if you just wanted to check for all the mega-rare species?
Sorting the Bird News Extra page is a quick way to help achieve all of these, and it's very quick and simple to do.
At the top of the list of reports you'll find a series of columns headings: R, Added, Species, Area, Site. Just click on the appropriate heading at the top of the list to sort the records by that field:
- R - this sorts the list by "rarity level", with the rarest species first
- Added - this sorts the list according to the time the report was added (newest first) - the default order
- Species - this sorts the reports into taxonomic order (with reports sorted by time within each species)
- Area - sorts by county, in alphabetical order (and then by time within each county)
- Site - sorts by site, in alphabetical order
These sort options also work in conjunction with your Web Filter options (if applied) and can also be used to rearrange the list of reports you get back from a search on the search page.
Your most recently selected "sort setting" is stored and applied thereafter whenever you change it, so if you just want to try this out, remember to click "Added" at the top of the list to return the sort order to normal when you've finished. We do occasionally get puzzled emails from subscribers who've clicked a column heading accidentally and who can't understand why the reports are appearing in a "strange" order; clicking Added will sort this out.
This feature is only available to Bird News Extra subscribers.
