Life List Print

How to download your eBird life list

Life List Print reads the spreadsheet eBird gives you. There are two ways to get one, and the first is the better one: it carries eBird’s own count.

Option 1: the Life List (use this one)

  1. Sign in at ebird.org and open My eBird.
  2. Tap the total species observed, or choose Sightings Lists in the Manage tools. On a phone, tap Manage first to find them.
  3. For your whole life list, leave the region as it is. For one state or country, click the globe icon to refine the list by location. (The same page also has a calendar icon and a bird icon, for date and for species. Leave those alone for a life list.)
  4. Click the cloud icon, or the Download button. eBird gives you a spreadsheet of the list on screen.

The file is a CSV. Do not open it and save it again in a spreadsheet program before dropping it here: a program that rewrites a CSV can change dates and special characters. Drop the file exactly as it came from eBird.

What the file looks like

This is the header row of a real Life List download (checked on one world list; the file was named ebird_world_life_list.csv):

Row #,Taxon Order,Category,Common Name,Scientific Name,Count,Location,S/P,Date,LocID,SubID,Exotic,Countable

The last column, Countable, is how Life List Print knows what eBird counts. What counts on a life list explains it.

Keep the file name as eBird gives it. Life List Print reads the region from the name: a file named like ebird_US-OH_life_list.csv is read as an Ohio list, and a file whose name carries no region is treated as a world list. The world-list name was seen on a real download; the pattern for a region is UNVERIFIED against a live eBird download. A (1) added by your browser when you download twice is harmless.

Option 2: Download My Data (the full export)

This one has every observation you have ever submitted, not a list of species.

  1. Go to My eBird and click Download My Data in the sidebar. On a phone, tap Manage first.
  2. eBird sends you a spreadsheet. Save it. The sample used to test this site was named MyEBirdData.csv; eBird’s help article does not give the file name, so treat the name as UNVERIFIED.

Life List Print can read this file too, but it has to work out your species list itself, and the count can differ from eBird’s by a few. If you can, use Option 1.

Then

Go back to the drop zone and drop the file. If the page says it cannot read the file, check that it is the CSV from eBird and not a screenshot, a PDF or a spreadsheet saved in another format.

Sources read