Hi Folks
I use with regularity the Morcombe Birds of Australia and Birdsight on my iPhone.
Is there anything out there for Mammals of Australia that is similar?
Cheers
Steve Potter
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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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I reckon the Museum Vic iphone/ipad app is great. Not a complete field guide of course but way better than nothing and lots of interesting stuff. …..shame the “Little Eagle” pic is a Whistling Kite though!!
Cheers Dave Stowe
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Steve,
Museum Victoria has an app called “Museum Victoria’s Field Guide to Victorian Fauna” – it includes birds, butterflies, fishes, freshwater invertebrates, frogs, insects, lizards, mammals, marine invertebrates, snakes, spiders, and terrestrial invertebrates.
I am not sure if any of the other museums have created similar apps.
Paul Dodd Docklands, Victoria