My favorite way to record a  morning's birding is to use my camera. Here is a sample of my digital record keeping. It is a great way to enjoy two hobbies at the same time. It also has given me a better chance of identifying some birds at a later time than I had in the field and it gives me the enjoyment of reliving the birding as I work with the images. However the camera method has the downside of occupying my attention to the point where I can miss other things going on around me. In my case, though, I am out there to enjoy myself and that does not require that I feel as if I must be completely comprehensive in my coverage of an area. When I was a field biologist I had to be rather clinical but now I can place my own enjoyment first. You should, too.

If you don't use a camera, then you will want to use a notebook or a form of voice recorder. What you use will be whatever fits your personality. However, we ought to discuss what you will want to record.

Location: Certainly the most important part of location data will be providing enough information to allow you to go back there or, perhaps, to be very careful not to go back there. If you are only concerned with your own use, a simple description of where to turn will do just fine. In Arizona that will often involve something like :"turn left at the second dead blue pick-up truck." However, if you wish to place your records in the hands of others, you may use latitude and longitude data. In that case a GPS unit is helpful. I have a GPS  locate on my cellular phone and it works great.

Habitat Notes: Birds are very habitat-specific and are generally found in the same kinds of places in a given region. Ducks are not seen in dry deserts and Cactus Wrens are not found in Ponderosa Pine forests. A biologist would select one or two dominant plant species to use in naming an area and that system works very well. In that respect, you might have been in a Cottonwood/Willow area or an Oak forest. You will also want to characterize the area with notes such as: "slow moving stream" or "urban woods". Be sure to include the date, time of day you began and stopped, and notes about the weather. You will learn that some factors determine the presence or absence of a species and others influence the ease of seeing a species even though it is resides on your site.

The Birds: Oh, yeah: you will want to record the birds you see along with all the rest of this. But, there is more to do than generate a simple list. Record the approximate number you saw. This is will change with the season and the weather for a any given area and provide you with interesting local dynamics. Also record the activities of the birds. You will quickly develop an appreciation of the cyclic changes in bird behaviors during the course of a year. Pay careful attention to activities such as courtship, territorial display and feeding. The more you pay attention to the life actions of the birds the more you will appreciate the intricate way in which bird species (and others) interact with their communities.

Life Listers: I have been on bird walks and have come away with the understanding that there are two kinds of bird watchers. There are people who enjoy to actually watching and learning about birds. These are people like me who are willing to miss seeing a few species in exchange for the experience of being enchanted by the birds they do see. The other kind of bird watchers are the "life listers". These are people who take pride in having seen a great number of species. These folks see birds that I did not know even occurred in the same area which I just looked at. These birders provide a great deal of valuable information to science on matter such as bird species distribution and population trends. But they tend to move fast and go to the species B once they have identified species A. I would rather sit and watch.