Birding software, birding booksBurt and Tweeters,

I love bird books also and am an avid collector of just about anything I can
get my hands on. On the whole I couldn't agree more, however, there are
definitely some cases where the interactivity of software is not only loads
of fun but also quite useful. The reason I had asked about this is because
my company operates natural history expeditions all over the world and we
produce bird lists for the regions we will be visiting which we send to the
passengers in their final document package. In producing and editing these
lists, I realized that the software we use makes no delineation between a
regularly occurring species and one where there has only been one record. I
discovered this when I first starting working for the company and saw that
we (or rather the software) had produced a list for a trip to Iceland which
included Cerulean Warbler on it! While this is a rather specialized
application of the software, there are a myriad of other uses.

Software is by no means a replacement for the good old field guide but it
most definitely can be used as a supplement, an additional resource for
learning about birds.

Cheers,
Ted Kenefick
Seattle, WA

tedk at nwlink.com
-----Original Message-----
From: TWEETERS-owner at u.washington.edu
[mailto:TWEETERS-owner at u.washington.edu]On Behalf Of Guttman, Burt
Sent: Friday, January 03, 2003 10:26 AM
To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
Subject: Birding software, birding books


I keep being amused and puzzled when I read a lot of requests on Tweeters
or Birdchat for information about whether some birding software does this or
that or the other thing. I grew up looonnnng before the computer era. I
have books. The books have information about such things as distribution
and migration patterns, if that's what interests me, and of course they have
fine paintings of books for identification purposes. Yes, they go out of
date as patterns change, but so does software. I wonder whether anyone who
uses the software can explain why it's so much better than having
books--aside from our society's digital compulsion and its being the In
Thing, while books are now an Out Thing. I use my computer extensively for
writing--word-processing programs have improved and simplified my writing
far more than I could ever have imagined--and I have used the computer for
simple birding tasks, such as making lists and field notes, and recording my
sightings of birds in this way. But what does complicated software about
birds do that would make me want to buy it and spend my time fiddling with
it?

Burt Guttman guttmanb at evergreen.edu
The Evergreen State College
Olympia, WA 98505 360-456-8447
Home: 7334 Holmes Island Road S.E., Olympia 98503