Your sightings feed BirdMark
BirdMark is the East Asian-Australasian Flyway resighting database, run by the Australasian Wader Studies Group, Victorian Wader Study Group, and Deakin University. Every flag you read here is reviewed by the Senior Reviewer, then forwarded to BirdMark in their CSV format. The bird's full life history comes back within five days.
StewardWatch keeps the surrounding context in the For Shorebirds record: tide, weather, flock numbers, disturbance. BirdMark gets the bird. FSB keeps the moment.
Welcome. Begin a circuit by setting up your first stop.
Set up your first stop below.
Set up this stop
Choose where you are and what kind of site it is. The four gauges above and the context fields below describe arrival conditions for this stop.
Conditions at this stop
Stays in FSB. Not sent to BirdMark. The gauges above use plausible defaults, refine here if it matters.
Birds read at this stop
Encounter Notes Optional
What other visitors at this site were being told, and how it landed. Site-scale data — descriptive, not evaluative. Add as many as you observed at this stop; skip if none.
My Sightings
How StewardWatch works
StewardWatch is a Steward-facing capture tool. It does not replace BirdMark, the Australasian Wader Studies Group, the Victorian Wader Study Group, the Queensland Wader Study Group, the Global Flyway Network, or any of the researchers who actually band birds. Those organisations do the science. StewardWatch is the layer that helps trained Stewards turn what they see in the field into clean records that flow back into BirdMark, with surrounding context that a research record alone doesn't capture.
The simplicity belies the power. The decode panel that tells you "this bird was banded in Yalujiang Estuary" runs protocol-lookup, FSB-cache search, and BirdMark code construction at once. Every record carries an audit trail, when you logged it, when it was reviewed, when it went to BirdMark, when the life history came back. Nothing sits in someone's spreadsheet for months waiting to be entered.
Circuit-and-stops
A typical Steward outing visits more than one site. StewardWatch follows that pattern. You start a circuit at your first site, set up the stop, log the conditions, read flags. Then add another stop when you move on. Your identity and date persist; site, conditions, and flag reads start fresh. Each stop inherits its own context. End the circuit when you're done.
A single-stop session works the same way, just one stop, one End Circuit. No extra steps for the simple case.
Reading a colour combination
The EAAF Shorebird Colour Marking Protocol (MOP12 DD.10, 2025) assigns unique combinations to over 70 banding sites. A handful you're likely to see in Moreton Bay:
Full reference: EAAFP Colour Marking Protocol (PDF)
Where your data goes
Each bird writes to two destinations.
To BirdMark (research): observer, date, location, species, flag code, optional photo. Used for survival modelling, migration mapping, population trend analysis.
To FSB (steward context): tide, weather, flock numbers, disturbance, your confidence rating, FSB record ID linking back. Used to train new stewards and ground site management in real conditions.
Every sighting passes through the Senior Reviewer queue first, a one-pass plausibility check before forwarding to BirdMark. That keeps the data flowing in clean.
What comes back
Two feedback moments.
Immediately at submission, the decode panel surfaces the banding country and site, plus any prior FSB sightings of the same engraved code by other stewards.
Within five days of the reviewer forwarding to BirdMark, BirdMark replies by email with the bird's full life history, every prior resighting across the flyway. Paste the email into your sighting in My Sightings, and the history attaches.
The Steward Course
StewardWatch is for trained Stewards. The Shorebird Steward Course is the path: a single course covering the science, the protocol, the field practice, and the field component. Without that grounding, the colour codes and engravings can be misread, and bad data makes its way into BirdMark.
The public-facing tool is ShorelineWatch, that's where curious visitors get their taste of shorebird observation without the pressure of generating research-grade records. StewardWatch is the trained-Steward path.
Save StewardWatch for offline use
StewardWatch runs in the browser. Once loaded, the tool itself works without a connection — you can read flags at sites with no signal and the records sync when you're back in range. Two ways to keep it ready on a Steward's phone:
Scan to load the offline copy
1 · Add to Home Screen. Open StewardWatch on the phone, then use the browser's Share → Add to Home Screen (iOS) or menu → Add to Home Screen / Install app (Android). The tool launches like a native app and works offline once cached.
2 · Save the standalone copy. Scan the QR or visit forshorebirds.org/stewardwatch-offline. That page is the same tool with no FSB navigation — purpose-built for the field. Save the page, bookmark it, or hand the QR to another trained Steward.
Either way, sightings stay on the device until you're back online and the Senior Reviewer queue can pick them up.
Senior Reviewer
This area is for designated Senior Reviewers. Sightings held in the queue land here for plausibility checking before being forwarded to BirdMark.