> Which mammals, and why would they want to use the iPhone for birding anyway?
I thought I'd address this point as no one else has picked it up. (I
can only speak as a Homo sapiens, not the other mammals.)
For background, I've got something like four shelves of animal guides
(field guides, site guides, family guides - for birds, fish and
mammals) and another couple of shelves of books on ecology and
evolution. So, I like paper. With that said, I think that paper field
guides are doomed. (Give it ten years or less.)
There's a smart guy named Jakob Nielsen that says when you move stuff
on-line/into a computer, you have to make it "better than real life"
if you hope to attract users. What that means is that if you replace a
computer system with something that's just like the paper original,
why would anyone bother? They won't and they don't. An electronic
field guide can offer a whole lot more than paper - possibly more so
for birds than anything else:
* You can have plates and photographs.
* Bird sounds along with bird descriptions - all in one place.
* They're so darn portable! You can carry 50 "books" as easily as 1.
There are so obvious limiting factors and hassles right now for
electronic guides and the gear to run them on:
* Expensive - yet another piece of kit to worry about.
* They can break and/or run low on power. Not so much of an issue for
paper guides ;-)
* @ fiddly little screens.
I've got an iPod Touch (the gateway drug to the iPhone) and suspect
that an iPad would solve much of the above. Chances are, it won't be
until about iPad 6 that things are really getting ideal - but they're
already good. I was up in the US earlier this year and had along a
copy of iBird. Wow. It totally changed how I look at this (I thought
the iPhone/iPod looked absurd when it first came out - "the screen is
too small.") iBird is the best iPhone field guide that I've used yet.
Plates, descriptions, photographs and sounds. Beautiful. I saw and
unfamiliar woodpecker, looked it up, played the recordings and had a
confident identification. Try that with paper. I have - it was never
like this. It's hard to emphasize how powerful it is to have plates,
photographs and sounds in one place is.
Speaking of photographs, I've always been disappointed by photographic
guides on paper - I have several I've picked up but never carry them.
It's hard to get consistent coloring, light and attitude and they just
fail to impress. But....photographs are so great as a supplement.
After some time, plates look sort of plain and inaccurate in
comparison. Having both is really ideal. These days, the quality of
"amateur" photography rivals magazine-quality photography of old.
There are astonishingly good pictures of birds out there on the
Internet. This is particularly handy for species that are hard to tell
apart. Not so much of an issue in Australia where most species are
distinguishable, but a big issue in the rest of the world. Little
brown birds are hard to illustrate in a way that is both accurate and
helpful. Photographs help. Case in point: why is there an ongoing
question about which is the "best" field guide for Australia? (Pizzey,
obviously.) Because they all fall down at some point. There isn't a
single, great guide. Despite fine efforts, none of them really do a
great job on the hard birds - such as Thornbills. Thornbills in the
field are often far, far more distinguishable than they look in the
field guides.
Given the tiny screen size on the iPhone/iPod, I think that the
electronic field guides would be a pretty frustrating experience for a
group of birds/animals that your'e already acquainted with. I'm
familiar with the birds of the US and Australia, so I can see an
unfamiliar bird and at least know what family it's in. If you don't
know what family to start from, it's pretty hard to "flip through" and
figure it out. For that, a normal paper field guide is hard to beat
(at the moment.) So, if I were going somewhere new, like Peru (1800+
birds and a lot of unfamiliar families with _lots_ of hard to tell
apart species) - I'd take along a paper guide. Then again, if there
were an electronic version of the guide, I'd take it too for the
advantages mentioned already.
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