Birding and the Global, Virtual Field Guide
Flickr’s Field Guide: Birds of the World creates a community of birder-photographers online. This participatory, virtual field guide has members from Singapore, India, North America, and especially Portugal, for some reason.
Birders upload photos of the rare finds as well as the ordinary, collectively generating a whole new way to engage with bird taxonomy.
I spoke with Anita, one of the first administrators of the Field Guide with fellow bird-lover Gini.
The project has taken on a life of its own. We’re seeing it evolve as a resource that could be useful to people. I’ve gotten feedback from people on flickr saying, “Oh, I was trying to i.d. this bird and I saw your photo. So thank you for posting it.” And it wasn’t my best photo. It was a fairly common shore bird, a Willet.
Anita, flickr group Field Guide: Birds of the World
August 17th, 2005 at 8:21 pm
I love it. Anita’s the one who helped me ID the Willet. The little regional birding book I had didn’t have the Willet, even though I see them at least half the time I go to the salt marshes. Anita and the Field Guide continue to help. Just today they helped me to identify a Tern that didn’t quite match anything I found in either Sibley or the National Geographic field guide books. Now that bird has been added to the Flickr field guide. That’s the best part: the ID line and the fact that the guide continues to grow and add juvenile, morphs, seasonal and occaisional markings as well as the main markings found in most books.
August 18th, 2005 at 8:03 am
[...] particularly the one group that I help administer Field Guide: Birds of the World. In the article which is posted, I get quoted and they used one of my pictures [...]