birding-aus

Handbook of the Birds of the World Alive

To: Carl Clifford <>
Subject: Handbook of the Birds of the World Alive
From: jenny spry <>
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 17:40:01 +1000
Hi all,

I signed up with a supporting membership a few days ago and it is
excellent. Perhaps one way to look at it is, it is an *abridged* on line
HANZAB, but for all the birds of the world. But if you can live without
HANZAB you can probably live without HBW Alive. In fact if the Aus field
guides have enough reference content for you and you don't bird outside
Aus, you can probably live with out it. And it is not a Morecombe style
field guide app, it is a sit at home or in the motel room online website
reference.

It doesn't have as much text for each species as HANZAB, so does not
replace it for Australian birding, but it does have more than a field guide
and it does have links to online refereed papers etc and these, in many
cases, will be more up to date than some of the HANZAB references are now.

The species are all illustrated, complete with illustrations of many of the
races, and distribution maps. There are some photos and calls and these are
supplemented with links to IBC for more photos and to xenon-canto for extra
calls. There are some very good videos.

There appears to be no flight and underwing illustrations but that is about
my only negative comment. Where this is important, such as for
Hudsonian/Black-tailed Godwit the differences are mentioned in the text.
Waders are only shown in breeding plumage. The links to IBC do make up for
this, and HBW is not pretending to be a field guide.

 The home page has sections for "Recent Updates", "Latest News" and
"Highlighted References" which make good reading. On the species pages
subscribers can make "wikicontributions" and "Public Comments" for each
species.

It is not yet complete, with many of the sort and list features not yet
working, but as an online resource tool for researching the birds of the
world it is worth the annual subscription, to me any way.

cheers

Jenny
http://jenniferspryausbirding.blogspot.com.au/




On 27 July 2013 14:11, Carl Clifford <> wrote:

> Has anyone on the list signed up for HBW alive yet? It looks pretty good
> for around AUD 50 per year. I would be grateful for any feed back.
>
> Car Clifford
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