[mou] Bird Banding Lab Species Codes

[Refsnider]

At the risk of further beating a dead horse, here are the rules used by 
the U.S. Geological Survey's Bird Banding Laboratory (BBL) for 
constructing 4-character species codes ("alpha codes") from the common 
names of North American birds.  After unsuccessfully searching the BBL 
web site, I obtained this material from  
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/z/nom/bblrules.html.

Perhaps more than you wanted to know, but a few folks had expressed 
interest in the "rules."

---Ron Refsnider
==========================


    *The BBL code system: Rules for forming the codes*

The US FWS Bird Banding Lab codes were introduced in:

    Klimkiewicz, Kathleen, and Chandler S. Robbins. Standard
    abbreviations for common names of birds. North American Bird Bander
    1978, 3:16-25. 

Codes are formed using these rules:

   1. If the name consists of only one word, the code is taken from the
      initial letters, up to four:

              DUNL  Dunlin
              DOVE  Dovekie
              OU    Ou
              GADW  Gadwall

   2. If there are two words in the name, the code is made from the
      first two letters of each word:

              AMWI  American Wigeon
              EAME  Eastern Meadowlark

   3. For three-word names where only the last two words are hyphenated,
      the code uses two letters from the first word and one each from
      the last two:

              EASO  Eastern Screech-Owl
              WEWP  Western Wood-Pewee

   4. For other names with three words, the code takes one letter each
      from the first two words and two from the last word:

              RTHA  Red-tailed Hawk
              WWCR  White-winged Crossbill
              WPWI  Whip-poor-will

   5. For four-word names, the code takes one letter from each word:

              BCNH  Black-crowned Night-Heron
              ASTK  American Swallow-tailed Kite
              NSWO  Northern Saw-whet Owl

A /collision/ is a situation where two or more names would abbreviate to 
the same code using these rules.

The Bird Banding Lab decides what code to use in these cases. If one 
name is far more common than the other name or names involved, typically 
the common species gets to use the name. In most cases (e.g., Lark 
Bunting and Lazuli Bunting) when both birds are common, the collision 
code is not used, and unambiguous substitutes are provided for both forms.