Ian,
Adult as default abundance
I agree, this is a frustrating and bad assumption to make. It's not technically a bug as the Recorder system design document specifies this behaviour. However, I do feel this is a design choice that needs to be changed. As a work-around, we add a generic qualifier of 'present' to all abundances that have no qualifier.
BOU list issues
You need to ask species dictionary questions in the Species Dictionary forum, which John Tweddle, data manager of the Species Dictionary Project, monitors. If you ask species dictionary questions in other places such as this thread, there's a strong chance he won't see it and thus your question is likely to go unanswered. This time, though, I'll need to ask a few questions to get the the bottom of your bird list problem:
The BOU checklist for 2006 is there with most of the new names and new scientific names, but, on import when the Species in the to be imported list and the Recorder list are compared, we get:
I'm not sure what you mean here; could you possibly reword this?
Blue Tit / Blue Tit (Parus caeruleus (Linnaeus, 1758) / BIRDS British Ornithologist Union Bird List (Categories A, B, C)
so why is the old 'Parus' name shown and not the new 'Cyanistes' that is in Recorder - in the list I had chosen for the import process?
Where do you see this exactly? If I import a record of a blue tit (i.e. 'blue tit' is what's in the species name column of the import spreadsheet), at the species matching stage I choose the BIRDS BOU list and click search. The species that gets matched is this:
Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus (Linnaeus, 1758))
On final import, the record appears as Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) in the the Observations Hierarchy.
Finally, a word of warning about concatenating abundance qualifiers - make sure you remove spaces from the qualifiers first. So 'Adult female' would become 'Adultfemale'. The import wizard will allow you to add the space back in when you come to the qualifier matching stage. If you do not do this, an abundance of '1 Adult female' will be interpreted as two abundances: the first with a value of 1 with a qualifier of 'Adult' and the second with a value of 'female' and a qualifier of none, which as we know converts to 'Adult'; net result being two entries in your measurements tab looking something like this:
1 Adult
female Adult
Hope that's clear. It's an issue that's easily worked around - you just have to be aware of it.
Charles
Charles Roper
Digital Development Manager | Field Studies Council
http://www.field-studies-council.org | https://twitter.com/charlesroper | https://twitter.com/fsc_digital