ROGER, YOU'D BE PROUD
A Review of North American Birds with Roger Tory Peterson
by Ron Enderland
There are an estimated 65 million "birders" in the USA. These include folks
with a wide range of dedication to the hobby, from professional ornithologists
to more casual fans like myself. I don't travel to Alaska to see auklets,
but I do feed around 400 lbs. of sunflower seed to the local population of
feathered friends every winter!
This exquisite program is aimed at those who have an interest in bird life. It's also entertaining enough to attract converts from among the population not yet captivated with birding.
If you've ever pored through A Field Guide to Eastern Birds, then I guarantee that you will love this program. Basically, it's everything in the familiar reference work, as well as much information on western birds (from the Western Field Guide), bundled with a whole lot more.
The opening screen gives you eight different directions to go. Upon initial
install, you
are
defaulted to one of the choices,
a short video of the master
himself, Roger Tory Peterson. This was filmed shortly before his untimely
death on July 28, 1996. He runs you through the options. These include:
Visual Category Guide--The gateway into the listing of birds themselves.
Peterson Online--A shortcut to an excellent website.
Peterson's Perspective--A marvelous ten minute movie in which he gives a short course on finding and identifying birds.
Lifelist--Lifelists are familiar to serious birders. This included package is a computerized means to database your personal record of birds that you've observed.
Bird Finder--A quick and easy way to narrow down the search for
that little feathered guy that you saw eating suet at your
feeder.
Skill Builder--Two quizzes. One is identifying silhouettes, the other is identifying birds from photos.
To paraphrase Ed McMahon, everything that you'd possibly want to know about birds is on this disk! The easily learned interface provides you with numerous information choices on each species, including range, habitat, feeding, and Peterson's indispensable field marks. There is also a thumbnail which will become a 640 x 480 image of the bird when you select "Field View."
The Field Guides are the state of the art when it comes to birding. It's difficult to imagine how a printed book could possibly be any better. The only problem that I have with them is being able to distinguish between, for example, "notes are high and squeaky" (ruby-throated hummingbird) and "shrill squeaky notes" (buff-bellied hummingbird).
Yes, bird calls are notoriously difficult to translate into printed form.
Here is where this program
shines.
Included for the great majority of listed species are incredibly high quality recordings of their voices! These were assembled by Cornell University, and my hat is off to the engineers responsible.
Perhaps the most poignant recording, however, was not recorded by the Cornell team. It is a fifteen second clip of the now extinct ivory-billed woodpecker, which has become the symbol of what can happen when man's relentless drive to destroy the environment runs unchecked. This clip is from a movie filmed in the 1940's.
To sum up, the knowledge presented
is immense, the interface is fairly
easy to learn, the program is extremely well designed. I really hate
to give perfect scores, but this fine presentation rates one.
Multimedia Cafe Scorecard
| Product: |
North American Birds with Roger Tory Peterson |
| Company: |
HMI |
| Cost: |
n/a |
System Requirements:
486 or higher IBM-compatible PC
8 MB RAM
Windows 3.1 or higher
SVGA display
Double-speed CD-ROM
drive
MPC-compatible sound card (22KHz, 16 bit)
20 MB hard drive
space
Mouse
Overall Score:
Copyright © 1997 InfoMedia, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.