I have used both the Thayer Birding Software and Bird Base. The Thayer
CD-ROM is useful as a source of both pictures and sound (it will probably
induce us to get a color portable with a CD-ROM drive for our next bout of
trailering), and the world list contains a lot of useful information. On the
other hand the listing program is based on Microsoft Access and is painfully
slow even on a 120 MHz 486. Since I already had my life list on Bird Base 3
(compact, fast, but with a frustrating and user-unfriendly interface) I tried
Bird Base for Windows and found it a fairly reasonable compromise. It is
still not perfect, but the interface is much easier to cope with and it is
much faster than the Thayer. I'm not sure what I would do if I could
transfer all of my past records to Thayer. Bird Base is promising a Windows
version of their Bird Area program 'real soon now' and Thayer is equally
promising a 2.0 version with good world-wide lists; so who knows what will
happen in a few months.

In short, I'm presently using Thayer for local lists since it is easy to trim
the selection list to WA birds and keeping my world-wide life list on Bird
Base.

Incidentally, we just got the Audubon CD-ROM. It's very pretty, but I think
the Thayer is probably better for the experienced birder.

George Stout
Gig Harbor, WA