🚀 go-pugleaf

Ok,
what is birding software? An electronic fieldguide, a list keeping
program (database), a combination of both?  I know a couple of CD-ROM
based "fieldguides" like Thayer's BNA, Peterson's CD, and 2 or 3
European ones ( The best is a 4 CD collection with LOTS of all possible
details = 400 british pounds).
Most of these programs have what they call ID help.  Forget it! If you
are not able to find a match in a printed guide, the computer won't be
able to do it for you either.  I tried this function in BNA with a bird
I knew and gave all the information and it wasn't on the list with the
suggestions.
However, a stronghold of the cd's is the combination of pictures,
sounds, and videos. But none of the above mentioned programs uses
multimedia perfectly.  First I miss the information in what behavioural
contex the sound is heard (male, female, alarmcall etc.).  Most of the
pure audio CDs give this essential information in a booklet and
sometimes even recordings from different geographical location (dialects
and slang are common within one birdspecies). Also some of the videos
are also pretty useless.  They show the bird, like the photos or
drawings. No additional information! Others are good.  They show
specific behaviour like feeding techniques or mating display, sometimes
also very specific fieldmarks. Just a few examples: diving terns,
feeding shorebirds, broken wing display in plovers etc. etc.  Some of
these points shouldn't be to difficult to add to new versions of
existing CDs. Pay attention software industry.
Listing software is a different chapter.  Listing doesn't mean a life
list first -at least not for me-, and a program which is only able to do
this would be a nice gimick on a birding-CD, nothing more.  Listing is
collecting data of what species were seen at a particular time of the
year(or fieldtrip) in which habitat, or were and when a paricular
species was found.  A database! This kind of data collection allows
finaly to draw the maps we find in our fieldguides and gives a lot more
information about birds (i.e. christmas bird counts).

The non-plus ultra birding software is not existing, and never will.
Wouldn't it be nice to connect a palm notebook directly to your scope
and the computer tells you what's in the view? Nope, wouldn't be fun
anymore!

My two cents
Good birding

Ulli

Jon and/or Susan Herriott wrote:
>
> On Mon, 11 Oct 1999 15:33:03 GMT, birdbrain7220@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> >I love the one I got
>  Dear BB,
>      You mention pictures......as I am also looking for "good birding
> software", I went to the avisys site and found only references to
> manipulation of one's lifelist as if that mattered . IMHO, the
> lifelist is the least important thing about birding.. I am looking for
> help in identification and don't see why a good program couldn't
> assemble a screen of pictures of all birds that fit your input
> description with hints on how to distinguish among them and be able to
> provide songs, maps of distributions etc.  Does your candidate do
> these things?   thanks.......jon