RSPB Birds of Britain and Ireland: Interactive PC and PDA Edition (Rspb Interactive PC & Pda Edit) [CD-ROM] [Hardcover]

Why would I want this?
When travelling it allows you to carry several books worth of info on a laptop or PDA, to identify birds in the hotel or even in the field. At home it allows you very rapid access to a lot of information, including sound and is the fastest and best tool available for identifying birds.

Where is the content from?
This CD-ROM includes content from several books. According to the references, this is taken from "RSPB handbook of British birds", "The Handbook of bird identification", "Where to watch birds - Britain", "where to watch birds - Ireland", and the sounds are from a 5 volume set by by Jean-Claude Roche. It seems that these have all been used in their entirity, which is quite a few £s worth of information! These are all excellent books too in their own right and I already owned several of them when I bought this CD. Put together, the quality exceeds any book I have seen.

How does it work? (1)
The search is instant and finds the bird as you type - a zero second delay is really nice after getting used to using the web! This is on my moderately specced laptop with other things running in the background. The first screen shows the family page, and the bird song starts playing automatically. You can click the pictures of the other birds and see a quick distribution map and info for each. This is great for that first identification. Of course, the similar birds are not always in the same family, but it covers that too - at any time in the application you can click "Similar" on the top menu, and it selects a group of similar Birds which you can browse through in slightly more detail and compare. For example, the Scarlet Rosefinch shares it's family page with the Bullfinch, Scottish Crossbill and Crossbill, whereas the 'Similar' page puts it up against the Crossbill, Lesser Redpoll and Linnet.

How does it work? (2)
Once you get down to the individual bird page, there is a lot of information available - birdsongs (which are always clear and include several different songs), illustrations (inclcuding male, female, juvenile, seasonal and regional variants etc), Photos (always very clear), and Distribution maps covering the UK, and Europe (covering a square from Morocco to the Arctic to Russia to Iraq). The text is very good, and although it does not include the interesting anecdotes you might get in a very weighty Bird book such as Collins one, it is very punchily written, well broken up, and thorough, including all the information you need to identify the bird, including headings like Habits, Voice, Habitat, Food, Breeding, Distribution, Migrations, Population and Conservation.

How does it work? (3)
There is also a map of the UK, with UK Birding sites, including the type of habitat, the birds you might see there, a local map, and how to access the site. This is hard to find and only available from the homepage.

(Minor bug..)
Note - on first install the home page of the application may appear blank - this is due to incompatibility issues with Adobe Flash - I guess this is due to this being a 2005 release and Flash as changed a lot since them. Try a reboot, and it that doesn't fix it, then try the top menu: "Setup-Configuration", then "General", and untick "Show flash Home Page".

How does it work? (4)
The final feature is 'birding lists' where you can create your own lists of birds you have seen, and add notes to each bird page. I have not used this as it seems a little pointless to me, but others may find this useful.

How does it work? (5)
The software can be used on a PC or a PDA (the PDA version works by creating an SD card-based install from the CDROM, which you can then insert into the PDA).

What is the usability like?
Once in the Bird list (the main way it'll be used by most) it's pretty good, with a simple scroll list and various filters and sorts. However, in other places it is pretty lousy. Actually, I should admit at this point that usability is my profession, so I may be a little more picky than most, but I still think it would be confusing for many until they got used to it. The top bar navigation is OK, but has lots of room for improvement. The overall navigation architecture is lousy and clearly has not been thought through very well. The navigation withing the Birding sites section is truly appalling and it can prove almost impossible to use at times. So it achieves it's main goal pretty well, but rapidly deteriorates elsewhere, although all except the location map is learnable.

Licensing and T+C gripes (1)
I also have a gripe about the licensing - to use it on a PC and a PDA you need two seperate licences, as it locks it to your computer. In this day and age that seems a little restricting. If I had paid £40 for it (the RSPB shop still sells it for that much), I'd be hopping mad, but since I picked it up on my high street for £6, I just went out and bought another one, and it was still a great price even at £12.

Licensing and T+C gripes (2)
I also have a minor gripe about the terms and conditions. In there is says that the registration is only 'warranted' for 2 years from date of purchase. I'm sure this doesn't mean much - just the usual unnecessarily aggressive Ts and Cs you always get with software, but I still have to mention it as to me it seems pretty rude and doesn't match the way the RSPB usually operates.

Should I buy this?
Absolutely. Compared to a book, it's much faster and easier to use, plus it has the sounds. Commpared to the web, it's an awful lot faster to use, and it has a lot more info. Compared to other software? Well, I've not used them, but the source books and sounds used for this CDROM are second to none, and this is all you need for identification. And the price? Six pounds! So if you want to buy another CDROM, fair enough, but buy this too. It helps support the RSPB as well.

A superb and very useful product especially for field work.

Had problems moving data from PDA to PC on a Windows 7 64 bit system. Rapid response from the support team provided working solution.

A very good product full of all the information you need to identify british birds,and listen to bird calls as well
Recommended product.