Has anyone heard of any movement by the book
publishers to make any of the bird guides available in
digital format on a PDA? Seems like a cool
application that would make sense.
Could you imagine having several bird books available
and cross-referenced on a PDA, so you could be
carrying a small unit with all in the information of
several books, without having to carry them all
around? Pull up images, distributions, and text from
several books for the same species. Toggle between
entries for each books.
Color PDA screens are about 3 inches across, which is
about the same size as photos and drawings of birds in
the guides.
Hierarchical access to the information
instantaneously. Click Sparrow, pick from the list of
sparrows. Or key out further by specifying key
features of the bird in quesiton.
Then get really crazy. Tie the PDA into a GPS unit,
so it would know where you are. It could then sort up
the most likely sparrows by geography, for instance.
Tie in the date and you could sort by location and
season.
Then once you have ID'd the bird, have the PDA save
the location and date.
Tie a digtal camera into the PDA to store the images
you take with your camera, and store them with the
date amd location.
Digitally record and store the song the same way.
Then get REALLY crazy. Tie it all into a cell phone,
and access the web. Record the song and a digitial
image. Send it out as an Email to Tweeters asking for
help with the ID. Check Email for answers while you
are still in the field. Send a Page signal to any
experts you know to get quicker response.

This is all possible with the technology available
right now. And it would not be that expensive.

A buddy of mine is really into field computing
equipment, and used to to some birding, so he is aware
of bird watching problems and the field computing
solutions. He gets some pretty wild ideas some times.

But still, Wouldn't it be cool?

Guy

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Guy McWethy
Renton, WA
mailto: lguy_mcw at yahoo.com

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