The ID Wizard helped introduce us to our friendly neighborhood Black-headed Grosbeak.
While living in a concrete jungle can seriously hamper your bird-watching endeavors, Thayer’s Guide to Birds of North America brings the wetlands to your office. Whatever your habitat, this software has everything that casual or serious birders need: comprehensive profiles of over 900 birds, pictures, video clips, maps, and (our favorite) song samples provided by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Not sure whose chirp woke you up this morning or which bird it was that you spied through your trusty binoculars? You can plug in color, markings, size, habitat, location, or song description, and the ID Wizard will identify the mystery bird. Still not positive? Play the video clip to see the bird in action. We used the ID Wizard to find a gray bird with an orange belly and a lightly colored beak spotted in Northern California, and found a match with the melodious Black-headed Grosbeak. While the ID Wizard inexplicably included brown birds from the Arctic in its search results, the thumbnails were useful for quickly narrowing down our choices. Trying to find a bird by its song, while delightful, is more challenging—unless you have perfect recall or happened to record the song, it’s hard to differentiate between the various chirps and twills.
The ID Wizard lets you search for birds by size, location, coloring, and more.
If you want to learn more about a particular species, or you just want to browse through the ornithological bible, the software has excerpts from the venerable Birder’s Handbook, which includes hundreds of articles on behavior, natural history, naming conventions, and habitat protection. We especially enjoyed the quizzes, where you match song to bird, use flash cards to identify birds from your area, or test your birding skills with multiple-choice identification questions.
If you know what you’re looking for, using this app is a walk in the wildlife park. If not, you may have trouble precisely identifying the species you’ve seen, but you’ll still have fun searching through the vast array of North American birds in its database. And the quizzes will convert anyone who isn’t already a birder. Thayer’s Guide is a commendable salute to our fine-feathered friends.
COMPANY: Thayer Birding Software
CONTACT: www.thayerbirding.com
PRICE: $84.95
REQUIREMENTS: G3, G4, or G5; Mac OS 10.3 or later; 256MB RAM; 750MB hard drive space
Easy-to-use, comprehensive catalog of birds. Includes song samples and short videos clips. Fun quizzes. Universal binary.
Expensive. Can be tricky to identify birds using search features.
