Hi Justin, on most programs as soon as you hit enter and the species is a life bird it lets you know (for example, look at the iPad app My Bird Observations, but Avisys did this as well). This is the preferred way. An ad hoc filter for life birds between certain dates would also work, but would be a poor second choice. Avisys both told you a bird was a life bird when you entered it, and let you do a list records and tell you which life birds you saw in chronological order between any two dates, or in any country. Once a birder starts traveling a lot it becomes more and more difficult to keep track of whether you have seen a bird in a given place. Most birders I know, even if non-competitive, want to know what their life list is and whether a bird was a life bird or not.

I can see various ways to implement this. One approach would be "conditional formatting" or a flag/icon that highlights a species whenever it is recorded for the first time (or a pop-up as Jeff suggested). If the flag showed up throughout the program, this would also help to retrospectively identify lifers in individual existing entries/reports (not just new records). In addition, a custom report that focuses on "first recordings" might be very useful. For example, a Life List report could list the first sighting of every species recorded, with the date and location noted (maybe list in reverse chronologically order with headings for years). And if you enabled filters to be applied, then this same report could become a year list (by filtering by year) or a country/location list (by filtering by country/location).

Where would you most like to see this? How would you like this to work?

I agree. I cannot find a way to identify "lifers" in entries or in species reports. This is very disappointing.