Let’s begin with a little side-story from a decade ago. In 2014, on top of getting involved in another birding Big Year, I slowly got closer to the birders from the NSS Bird Group. Eventually, I helped them set up their WordPress blog, Facebook Page and a separate Facebook Group as well. It was an active period, both in birding and in things concerning birding. On the latter case, I started strategizing for NSS on how to build an online presence that served the birding community better. Engaging the community’s interest included a lot of writing birding articles on our blog, drumming up interest in and moderating the newly formed Facebook Group and Page and explaining birding best practices in person. I was everywhere and involved in many things. It was a good year and I became an improved birder and a better communicator in the end. Winning the Big Year against experienced competitors then was just the cherry on top.

By 2015, I was also invited to join the NSS Bird Group’s Records Committee and was considered part of the inner group of leaders involved in the Bird Group. But unfortunately all was not well, for reasons I’ll explain in more details one day. In the end, we parted company amicably and I gave control back to NSS members most of the assets I’ve spent my effort building. Pity that in removing my role from the WordPress site, articles I authored were no longer reflected as mine.

The entire thing was not as bad as it may sound here, as I was actually on friendly or at least polite terms with most of the NSS birders, even today. We just have different ideas on what’s the best way forward, and I did offer my suggestions on how they should proceed in finding new talents to groom for bigger roles in the future.

By the end of the year in December 2015, having some time to reflect, I felt re-energized and motivated to move forward with my own plans instead. I came out with a few ideas on how to contribute back to the birding community and one of them was to create a bird app, with an emphasis on nice bird photos provided by the local birding community itself. So I posted my thoughts in the independent Facebook Group I set up earlier called Bird Sightings.

The idea of the bird app was well received but there were more pressing matters at hand. Part of it was that we still needed to compile all the information needed for the bird app, like photos, description of the birds, habitat of the birds, it’s breeding range and all the other things that at that time were not as readily available. I thought we’ll fill in those parts first and then perhaps move into app building. So first thing first, we needed to build a website to facilitate in the writing, and in asking for contributors to actually write, and/or provide photos. I’ve actually outlined some of the process in building the site in a blog post at here.

For the content site, I persuaded my birding buddy See Toh to be the main editor and writer, and I helped contribute some write-ups as well, but my work was mainly at the back-end. I have also persuaded members of the birding community over at Bird Sightings FB group to provide great photos of some of the birds. Within days, we got something out as a start.

For reasons that I have now forgotten, my first write-up was actually posted as a page here in this blog first rather than at the new Singapore Birds Project site, so you can actually see what I wrote here unchanged from the day it was posted:

So on 4 January 2016, the project’s website was launched. It was a modest and pretty bare site, but we intended to move quickly to fill the gaps.

See Toh was great at writing the species accounts, and we very quickly filled out the outline for many of the uncommon and rare species. We cannot help but be birders looking out for rarities and hoping that our write-ups will facilitate future sightings of some of these species. Knowing that the species write-up was going well, I self-relegated my efforts to the back end of things and to figure out what information was important to fellow birders, and what was possible to do with my limited scripting knowledge and resources. In 2016, what we felt important was to provide birders that came to our pages with information about the bird species with regards to their description, how they differ or look the same as other species, where they can be found and where they came from if they are migrants, what’s their behaviour, and very importantly, clear photos of said birds to aid in visual identification.

I wanted both the Malay and Chinese name for birds included in the website, because I thought we needed to cater for some of the Chinese speaking birders among us, and I always felt an affinity to the Malay bird names being that many of the resident and common birds in South-east Asia would have been named first by the native inhabitants, and the English names were somehow less interesting. The first problem was I am Chinese illiterate! Secondly there were quite a few different Malay names of the same birds created by different field guide authors. For the former problem, thankfully there were multilingual birding list provided by IOU that was just a matter of extracting them throughs some scripting. For the Malay name, I had a friend Tou Jing Yi, who was actively compiling them and updating them to the current taxonomic treatment. His website is here.

For those thing we cannot fully provide, we provided links to other sites that could. In 2016, Oriental Bird Images (OBI) was a useful resource for bird photos, xeno-canto was important for bird calls and song, Wikipedia was important for general information about the species. In 2024, the order of importance have changed, with eBird taking over many of these needs. The challenge for the website (which is now called Birds of Singapore), is to continue to stay relevant and helpful to birders new and old. For that, a new generation of birders are charting the way forward. Oh yeah, the bird app thing? It never happened during my watch. We just took a different journey!

P.S. In writing this entry, I relied heavily on Facebook to confirm details of events. I am still a bit wary of the longevity of Facebook in terms of preserving some of these older postings. There is no guarantee that in the future things will remain as is, so I’ll try my best to write them down here in this blog.