You Won’t Have to Wing It Anymore

I put a bird feeder in my front yard, and soon had daily presentations outside my window of almost nonstop singing, frantic dancing and fighting.

It was as if a stock company of “West Side Story” had moved into my yard.

Not having been supplied with a program guide, I had no idea just what cast members of the bird world were paying me a visit. But luckily, a new CD-ROM arrived with the promise that it could help me to identify, from a database of almost 1,000 species, birds anywhere on this continent.

It’s “North American Birds,” a Windows disk hosted by Roger Tory Peterson, probably this country’s most famous birder (the folks into this hobby like that term far better than “bird watcher”). “For me, birds have always represented life,” he says at the beginning of a video presentation included on the CD-ROM, which is distributed by Houghton Mifflin Interactive.

Peterson published his first field guide to birds in 1934, and just about ever since his system of identifying our feathered friends has been enormously popular. The system is based on the idea that if you pinpoint a few key factors about a bird in question, you’ll be able to greatly narrow down the possibilities.

The use of a CD-ROM has one, obvious disadvantage in this endeavor. You can’t very well use it out in the field, unless you are willing to lug around a laptop equipped with a CD-ROM reader.

But, for checking your notes when you get home or identifying birds outside the window, a multimedia guide has a lot of advantages. It can quickly do an electronic search through its database, using the key factors you input, and this CD-ROM includes audio recordings of the calls for many species (including some that are now extinct), as well as Peterson’s own well-known drawings and photographs.

(One disadvantage of the multimedia disc is its price, which is relatively high for an informational CD-ROM--about $60 in retail outlets.)

So, let’s see if this CD-ROM can identify two of the most common visitors to my popular bird feeder, a little bird and a bigger, kinda dopey one that eats the seeds that fall to the ground.

The first factor to input is “Visual Category,” and for this Peterson provides six choices, including swimmers, birds of prey and passerine, which means a type of bird that perches when resting. The little bird in my yard is definitely passerine, the bigger seems nonpasserine.

Next comes location, which you can choose by region or more specifically by state. I skipped the season category, because I’m not sure if these birds will be around all year or not. For habitat, I chose “urban” for both.

The size scale allows you to estimate size, based on pictures of common birds included on the CD-ROM. And finally, you choose coloring, including as many of the hues you noticed on the bird (this is where binoculars would have come in handy).

With all the info input, I hit the “Search” button and in short order, the CD-ROM came up with 12 possibilities for the little bird and seven for the bigger one. I made the final choice by studying pictures and drawings, and checking detailed information about characteristics and markings.

It will come as no surprise to those of you more in touch with nature than I am that little one turned out to be a House Sparrow and the big bird was a Mourning Dove, two very common birds to the area.

There seems to be no rare birds visiting my feeder. I definitely got the earnest, but B cast.

If you really get into birding, you can find a lot of company on the Internet’s World Wide Web, where numerous sites are devoted to the hobby. One of the best places to start is https://compstat.wharton.upenn.edu:8001/siler/birding.html. This site provides an abundance of links to clubs and individuals who list the latest sightings all over the world.

* Cyburbia’s e-mail address is david.colker@latimes.com.