After trying a succession of options over the years I finally settled on the small (6.5" x 4.5") 6-ring notebooks holding loose-leaf inserts, that are available in many stationers. The one I have is labelled 'Pocket Book' by Concord. You can then fill them with lined or plain paper as required and I have all mine covering exact periods of either 1, 2 or 3 years back to 1985.

I also back-up these paper notes on-line and use a programme called 'Tickem' that was written by a pal of mine. I have mentioned this once before on this forum but it has been considerably up-dated since then.

Try www.tickem.com and have a look around.

It's very comprehensive and covers local patch (you set up patches/areas of your own choice) to County, Country and World lists. A nice addition in this version are images and calls linked to the records (unfortunately not yet covering Western Palearctic songs). But best of all it's completely free.

If anyone wants further info or help getting started then contact by PM. I also will post this under the Tickem thread for completeness.

Cheers, John

PS The instructions in the first post refer to the earlier version.

Tickem is a web-based programme a mate of mine wrote. It does loads of things from garden lists to world lists and everything else in between, it is an incredibly powerful tool. Also, for those of you visiting foreign parts, you can pull out country lists from anywhere in the world to check what would be new for you, construct blank checklists, print off trip reports, the list seems endless. Take Greater Manchester as an example of how it works at a local level (and there is no need to be registered to take a look). Here are some detailed instructions to get you started. In Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer open www.tickem.com Click on Birders Scroll down and click on John (HG-UK) (that,s me!) Next to All locations Any dates click on New Query Now to find Greater Manchester Under World Region click on Europe then Northern Europe Now go to Country / Local (choose UK from the dropdown if not the default) Open England (hit the +) and scroll down to G reater Manchester Check All Dates with a tick and click on Perform Query And hey presto there is my GM list. You can go further. Click on the Green Date for a given bird (e.g. Red-necked Grebe). Hover over Notes and you can see further details of all the records you have entered. Try clicking Google for a direct link to images of the bird. Once registered you could create you own patch list (Elton, Rumworth, Pennington) or even pull out records of friends for direct comparison. The list seems endless. There are, of course, a couple of drawbacks. It works fastest using Mozilla Firefox rather than Internet Explorer as the search engine (but I think Mozilla Firefox is faster and more reliable than Internet Explorer anyway). English names tend to be Americanised so be prepared to tick Loons and Jaegers. But, best news of all, it,s all FREE! Happy ticking, Cheers, John