I raised a question on Birdchat that I'd like to bring to Tweeters. As I said there, I use electronic devices to a very limited extent; I don't have an iPhone or anything like it, so I don't know anything about birding apps. So I would be most grateful if any of you who use them could educate me a bit. I assume that each app has some pictures/ paintings of NA birds, but do they include essentially all NA species (excluding rare accidentals, I assume), or only the most common, and how many pictures do they have? For instance, do they generally include pictures showing geographic variation? They include calls and songs, but do they give any variants or just one song for each species? I assume they all include range maps. Do they include info about migration routes or about times of migration? And what information to help identify birds--for instance, a scheme for narrowing an unknown to a category? And while we're at it, maybe some of you would comment on any features you would like to see in an app that you don't have at present.

Cheers and thanks to all,

Burt Guttman
The Evergreen State College
Olympia, WA 98505 guttmanb at evergreen.edu <mailto:guttmanb at evergreen.edu>
Home: 7334 Holmes Island Road S. E., Olympia, 98503