Laura Erickson's For the Birds

I love watching birds outside, or at least through the window when I’m stuck indoors. But there are times when I’ve no choice but to sit at my computer for hours at a time. I take peeks out the window, but overall I like to have something avian to look at while I’m working. And this week I received in the mail the perfect computer program for looking at and listening to birds when I’m supposed to be concentrating–the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s Guide to Birds of North America. This is an advanced version of a popular program most birders simply call Thayer’s, because it is designed by a man named Pete Thayer.

For every species of bird in North America, there is at least one, and often as many as five or six, photos, along with range maps and a wealth of basic information. There is also usually a recording, and sometimes even a video clip–my favorite is of a Green Heron catching a fish, and falling off its rock into the water. This program also contains the entire text of The Birder’s Handbook, a book by Paul Ehrlich, David S. Dobkin, and Darryl Wheye, published in 1988. Most of the information has stood the test of time, and because of the original book’s awkward format, it actually works better in a computerized version. The entire piece of software costs $69.95.

At the same time that the newest edition of this program is being released, Cornell and Thayer are also releasing shorter versions, one for every state and province. They sent me a sample, called Our Birds-Minnesota. It includes all the information, photos, and song recordings for the 266 regularly seen species in the state, and costs $24.95.

Although this program can be upgraded to the full version for about $48.00, it’s simply a subset of the main Guide to Birds of North America, so it seems to me much more sensible to spring for the main one to start with, especially because the state version is missing 157 species that are rare but do occasionally appear in Minnesota. The state versions don’t have The Birder’s Handbook, either–you need the full North American version to get that. You could also buy versions that include just waterfowl, birds of prey, or warblers, or one of birds that appear at feeders, but again, these are subsets of the main program that cost more than a third of the main program’s cost.

Cornell’s Guide to Birds of North America allows you to put your sightings into a built­ in database program so you can keep track of the birds you see, but it’s not a full­ featured listing program. Thayer’s company also offers a $140 piece of software called Birder’s Diary which can keep track of your lists and interfaces with this guide–this one includes birds from all over the world. I’m not interested, myself–I’ve been using another listing program, called Avisys, which is faster and less buggy, and allows me to enter data on my Palm Pilot. And the guy who designed Avisys, Jerry Blinn, has already put a free update on his site that allows people who own it to interface with the new Thayer’s. It’s so easy to look up birds on Avisys, and with the upgrade and the new Guide to Birds of North America, you can enter sightings and click a button to see photos or hear recordings of every one as you go. Avisys costs $99.95, but to run the Palm Pilot utility you need a special upgrade that costs $44.95, and the upgrade that allows you to generate checklists for every country of the world costs an additional $59.95. It does add up! Which of course brings me back to my original thought–I’d rather be outside watching the birds themselves. And that is absolutely free.