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 »

“Everyone is a birdwatcher, but there are two kinds of birdwatchers: those who know what they are and those who haven’t realized it yet.” So begins The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature, Jonathan Rosen’s investigation into not only the history of bird watching but into its very underlying spirit. While others have previously produced histories of the activity, anthologies of its artistic creations both written and pictorial, and veritable libraries full of instructional guides, Mr. Rosen, an accomplished novelist and presently the editorial director at Nextbook, has in this present work given the bird watching community a portrait of itself that discloses many of its deeper psychological aspects that have been too often missed by previous authors. Read the rest of this entry »