A&C Black, a division of The Bloomsbury Group and one of Europe’s premiere publishers and distributors of natural history titles, has recently updated their website and established a new blog – ACBWildlife’s Blog. The revisions to the site make it much easier to locate the firm’s many titles; it also highlights their Species Profile and RSPB Corner pages. The new blog, while still in its early stages, provides readers with in-depth essays on titles and topics relevant to the firm’s natural history publishing activities. Additionally, they have established a Twitter feed so that users of that social networking application can keep up-to-date with developments from the firm (although it must be noted that this feed is much more topically wide-ranging than natural history alone).

Harper Collins UK, publishers of such cornerstone natural history titles as the Collins Bird Guide, British Wildlife, and the monumental New Naturalists series, has now brought online Collins Birds, an exciting new website for bird watchers that combines social networking with extensive online bird reference and reporting resources. Drawing upon Collins’ extensive catalog of bird information compiled through years of producing some of the world’s finest field guides, this new free site offers users the opportunity to look up information on a particular species, report a sighting, maintain a personal checklist, review the latest real-time sightings near them on a satellite map, create sighting alerts for specific birds or locations, help out with user-submitted mystery bird sightings, upload and rate photos, make new friends, and participate in online discussions in the forum. Read the rest of this entry »