A system for encoding bird field notes

When there are multiple sightings of one kind of bird, but the locations or age or sex or other details are different, you can place each sighting inside the form element enclosed in its own floc element. The intent is that there be only one form element for each kind of bird in a day's notes.

The structure of a floc element is very similar to the structure of the form element, but it lacks the taxon-group that describes the taxonomic identity:

floc = element floc { single-sighting }

The content of a floc element is described above; see Section 5.8, “ The form element: records for one kind of bird ”.

Here's an example of the use of floc elements. If we have a single record of one American Robin (code amerob), it might look like this:

    <form ab6='amerob' count='1'/>

But if we saw three adults and five young:

    <form ab6='amerob'>
      <floc count='3' age='a'/>
      <floc count='5' age='i'/>
    </form>

If no location is given in the floc element, it inherits the location from the containing form element, or from the default-loc attribute of the day-summary element if the form element gives no location code.