>I'm looking for the best cd rom to give my son-in-law for Christmas. Since
>I have no access to viewing any of them, I'm hoping some of you will respond
>with advice. He is an experienced birder, who uses bird base and bird area
>to keep records on; so I thought he would like one of the bird cds which
>show the bird and let you hear its call.

I don't have anything to compare it to, but I got the Audubon Interactive
CD-ROM Guide to NA Birds a while ago. I run it on a mac PPC 6100 (the same
disk will work under windows 3.1 or 95; both systems need a huge amount of
free disk space, about 15-20 megs). I can't speak to the accuracy of data
it contains (I'm still a rank beginner) but the interface is somewhat
awkward and slow. You have to go through too many dialog boxes to get to
things, it's slow, and for some of the stuff it plain prevents me from
doing something sensible, such as asking for a single list of all birds
found in WA state throughout the year (I have to ask one season at a time,
print or memorize each season, and mentally delete duplicates). I can't
imagine using their scheme for keeping bird lists; just too slow and
clunky, with no text export for that or anything else as far as I can find.
The thing I hate most is that it takes over the entire computer rather than
running in the background, so to compare things from a different source, or
go read mail, you have to quit completely. On the other hand, the images
seem ok (often several of a species, sometimes from different regions), the
sound quality fine as far as I can tell (though there's generally no way of
telling which dialect they recorded, east or west or whatever. The 'bird
browser', though I can think of ways to improve it, has been fun to play
with. You can put in a few general criteria for size, color, habitat, etc
and it will show thumbnail pictures of the birds that match. It is
possible to go to their bird list and choose pictures/sound by common or
latinate name as well, though there again it's a bit clunky.

The main reason I kept it instead of returning it is that all of the images
and sounds are easily extractable into other utilities since they use
standard PICT image format and Quicktime sound format, and with some
persistence (I have masochistic phases from time to time :-)) I think I can
figure out their database format well enough to convert the whole smear
into Filemaker to make it faster and give it a useful interface. Over
thanksgiving I finally extracted a list of latinate name / common name /
family / file index number so that I can at least locate the images and
sounds for a given species to open in other utilities. (I'm trying to do a
'bird of the month' for myself so I can start learning calls. This month
my computer beep sounds like a pine siskin...)

I suspect that a serious advanced birder may get frustrated, unless he's
either patient or else willing to do some data manipulation to get the
stuff out in a less encumbered format. I'm certainly willing to contribute
my key to their file numbers if that's legal. Depending on what his
existing software can handle, that might be adequate to make the disk more
useful, especially if his existing programs can link to and use the cd-rom
files directly.

Does anyone happen to know what program generated the auduban databases?
They have a file extension of .cxb. It would certainly be wonderful if it
turns out to be some known format that I can convert directly rather than
their own internal one that I have to reverse engineer... Or, do any of
the other cd-roms have a more accessible database for the bird data (where
they occur, migratory status, habitat, size, etc?) I'm not adverse to
buying a second one to save oodles of work... (Better, is the data on the
net? I looked once, but didn't find anything quite like that.)

Allyn Weaks
allyn at cornetto.chem.washington.edu aka allyn at u.washington.edu
Pacific Northwest Native Wildlife Gardening:
http://chemwww.chem.washington.edu/natives/