The band stallion changes. A younger male challenges and displaces the lead stallion sometime between your May observation and your August one. The mares redistribute across two bands. A foal you photographed in spring is now running with a different group. Without a structured record linking individuals to band membership over time, the herd structure you're documenting collapses into a series of disconnected observations.
WILDID was built for exactly this problem: maintaining coherent identity records for individually-recognized wild horses across changing herd dynamics.
The Automated Lineage Logic
The architectural distinction in this template is the JavaScript trigger system. Band Stallion History is not a field you fill in manually — it updates chronologically as the stallion designation changes, building a historical record of which male led the band and when. Band Members similarly tracks the composition of the group over time.
That automation matters because manual record-keeping of band changes almost always falls behind observation cadence. A field researcher who visits a HMA (Herd Management Area) six times per year doesn't have time to reconstruct membership histories from raw notes after every visit. The trigger logic does it during data entry.
Band Stallion Input → Band Stallion → Band Stallion Of List is the identification chain: you identify the current stallion, that populates the band's stallion designation, and the stallion's own record updates to show which bands he has led. Sire and Sire of fields build the paternal lineage tree — over multiple years of observation, the pedigree of a HMA population becomes recoverable from the records.
Individual Identification Fields
Wild horse identification in the field relies on physical characteristics because BLM freeze brands are not always visible or readable at observation distance. The template captures the full identification profile: Coloring, Blaze (facial marking type), Mane Color, Socks (leg markings), Darker Legs, and Other Characteristics.
Front Photo, Right Side Photo, and Photo From with Photo Comments and Photo by provide the photographic identification record. For a horse without a visible BLM brand, the combination of coloring notes and dated photographs is what establishes identity continuity across observation sessions.
BLM # is the official freeze brand number for horses that have been processed through gather operations. Combined with Roundup Year, it anchors the individual to the BLM's administrative record. Current Status — herd, removed, deceased — tracks the population trajectory over time.
The Population Ecology Layer
Birth Year, Sex, Date of Death, and Location transform individual records into demographic data. Filter for all individuals with Current Status = Herd, group by Birth Year, and you have an age structure for the population. Filter for Date of Death in the current year and you have annual mortality data. Filter for Sex = Female with known Sire and Dam relationships and you can model genetic diversity within the HMA.
Satellite links to geospatial data — observation coordinates or range use patterns. Links connects to external records, BLM databases, or population management documents. The Reviewed boolean marks records that have been verified against photographic evidence, distinguishing confirmed IDs from working hypotheses.
For a citizen science monitoring program tracking 200+ individual horses across a large HMA, this template is the difference between a photo archive and a longitudinal population study.