When the Nest Registry Falls Apart
A seasonal monitoring program for little blue penguins (kororā) might cover 80 to 200 active nests across two or three sites. At the start of the season, the field coordinator knows which nests are where. By mid-season, when different volunteers are covering different routes on different days, the nest nomenclature starts to drift. "Burrow near the pohutukawa" appears in three sets of notes as a slightly different description each time. One observer writes B-14. Another writes Nest 14B. A third skips the ID entirely and just uses GPS coordinates that don't match any prior entry.
By the time someone tries to aggregate the breeding success data at the end of the season, the nest-level analysis is broken. You can't calculate per-nest hatching success if you can't match check records back to a consistent nest identifier.
The Nest ID (T2) template is the reference library that prevents this. Each nest gets one canonical record. The Nest ID field in the check log template links directly to this library as a relational entry — not as a text string that can be mistyped, but as a hard link to a specific record.
What Makes a Nest Record Complete
The template captures the attributes that differentiate nests in the field and across seasons.
Species is a choice field with three options: Fiordland penguin, Little penguin (the default), and Yellow-eyed penguin (hoiho). All three are monitored under New Zealand conservation programs, but their habitat preferences, nest types, and breeding cycles differ significantly. A monitoring program covering mixed-species sites needs this distinction at the nest level, not just at the site level. Filtering by species gives you an immediate subset — you can pull all hoiho nests across the program and review their status without sifting through the kororā records.
Nest Type is where the template gets specific about habitat classification. Twelve options cover the range of structures these species actually use: Open nest, Tree root, Nest box, Burrow, Riprap, Flax, Windfall, Fern, Earth burrow, Rock burrow, Rock cave, Rock overhang. The distinction between an Earth burrow and a Rock burrow matters for maintenance decisions — earth burrows are more vulnerable to collapse, flooding, and predator intrusion than rock-based structures. Nest boxes are managed infrastructure and get treated differently during site assessments. Having this classification in the record means habitat condition reports can be broken down by nest type, which is exactly the analysis a site manager needs when planning restoration work.
Location is GPS-captured via the location field type.
The nest's physical location in the app is linked to its position on the ground. When a new volunteer is assigned to check a route for the first time, they can navigate directly to each nest using the GPS coordinates in the record rather than relying on a hand-drawn map or verbal directions from someone who was there last season.
The Reference Record That Anchors the Season's Data
The Description field is free text — the place for the details that don't fit elsewhere. The height of the burrow entrance above the ground. Whether the nest has a tendency to flood in heavy rain. The specific landmark that helps you find it when the vegetation has grown over the path marker. The fact that this nest has been active continuously since 2018 and was originally established by a pair that was relocated from a development site.
That institutional memory lives in the Description field. When the program coordinator who set up the original monitoring system rotates out after four years, the Description field is what remains.
The Image field captures the visual reference — the photograph taken when the nest was first registered, showing the nest entrance, surrounding habitat, and any identifying markers. Cross-referenced with the GPS location, this is the fastest way to confirm you're at the right nest when you're in dense coastal scrub with three burrow entrances within two metres of each other, all pointing in slightly different directions.
The relational links from the check log back to this Nest ID library mean that every field observation is anchored to a permanent, uniquely identified location. When you're running breeding success calculations at season end, the grouping is by the Nest ID record — clean, unambiguous, traceable to a GPS point and a photograph.