This Birding Life Episode 20: iBird

A screen-shot from the iBird app on my iPhone.

Episode 20 of my podcast, This Birding Life, is now available for free downloading at Podcast Central on the Bird Watcher's Digest website and in the Games & Hobbies and Literature categories in the Podcast section of the iTunes store.

This episode is an interview with Mitchell Waite, the creator of several database-driven websites for bird identification, and the new and very popular iPhone application called iBird. Mitch tells about his early career as a writer and publisher of computer books and how this set the stage for merging his fascination with technology and love of birds into several neat product ideas.

Mitchell Waite and two of his iBird app logos.

In our next episode (TBL episode 21), we'll be in The Philippines, talking with a woman who is working to save two critically endangered endemic birds on the island of Cebu.

Thanks for listening to This Birding Life! More than 3,000 TBL episode files are downloaded each month—just from the BWD web servers, not counting those downloaded from iTunes. We're proud to be making interesting "ear candy" for bird watchers! And I welcome your comments, suggestions, and questions about the podcasts.

Adventure on Rapa Nui

There's a new episode of This Birding Life available at Podcast Central @ Bird Watcher's Digest and in the iTunes Store (Search This Birding Life under the Podcasts category--it's free!).

Episode #11 features Alvaro Jaramillo, tropical birder extraordinaire and tour leader for Field Guides, telling the story of his trip some years back to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) off the coast of Chile.

Alvaro Jaramillo on a quetzal observation platform in Guatemala.

Alvaro went to Rapa Nui on a whim, not expecting to see many birds. What he discovered there turned out to be one of the most amazing experiences of his life.

One of Alvaro's images from Rapa Nui.

This Birding Life is hosted on the Web by Bird Watcher's Digest and sponsored by Houghton Mifflin.

This Birding Life: Kenn Kaufman

Kenn Kaufman, creator of the Kaufman Field Guide Series.

A new episode of my podcast This Birding Life is available for your downloading and listening pleasure. It features a conversation with Kenn Kaufman, birding all-star, author, naturalist, and deep thinker.

We talk about a variety of topics: recruiting young bird watchers, birding technology, his fabulous field guides, and the legacy of the greatest bird watcher of all time, Roger Tory Peterson.

This Birding Life is brought to you by Bird Watcher's Digest and is sponsored by the good folks at Houghton Mifflin. You can subscribe to TBL (it's free!) by following the link along the right side of Bill of the Birds (see it over there?), or via Apple's iTunes store.

This episode of TBL is available in two formats: MP3 (audio only) and M4A (audio with images--which can be played on your computer or on your video iPod/MP3 player).

Since this is a new channel of content delivery/consumption for all of us, I welcome your comments and feedback on the This Birding Life podcasts.

NEW! This Birding Life!

I've been anxious to announce this for a couple of months! And since the word is already out there in a few places, it's time to open the curtains and get on with the show.

We're launching a new mode of sharing bird content here at Bird Watcher's Digest, it's a podcast, called This Birding Life.

"Dude, What's a podcast?" you may well ask...

Here's how the wikiheads at Wikipedia define 'podcast'

A podcast is a media file which is distributed over the Internet using syndicationfeeds, for playback on portable media players and personal computers.^[1] Like 'radio', it can mean both the content and the method of syndication. The latter may also be termed podcasting. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster. The term "podcast" is a portmanteau of the name of Apple's portable music player, the iPod, and broadcast; a pod refers to a container of some sort and the idea of broadcasting to a container or pod correctly describes the process of podcasting.

There are currently six episodes of This Birding Life (TBL for short) available for your listening pleasure. Among the already released episodes are a reading from Letters from Eden by Julie Zickefoose, a reading by Scott Weidensaul from Return to Wild America, a couple of interviews with Jeff Gordon about birding technology, and a recording from a keynote presentation I did called "The Perils and Pitfalls of Birding."

A seventh episode is "in the can" and should be available soon. I can't promise I'll do a podcast every week, but I'll try to keep them coming as regularly as possible. This is not only new technology and it's a new medium for content delivery so I (along with my colleagues here at BWD) am feeling my way along into the future.

New episodes of This Birding Life will be available for free download on the BWD website. The complete podcast is also available for free in the iTunes Store. Just do a search for This Birding Life. It's also listed here on PodcastDirectory.com

The Podcast Central section of the BWD website is sponsored by the Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers of the Peterson Field Guide series as well as the Kaufman Field Guide series. Special thanks to our friends at Houghton Mifflin for their generous support.

I seem to have been building up to this podcasting thing for a while. I love talking (especially to other bird watchers about birds). I enjoy the recording/creation of content process. And Yes, I love technology (but not as much as you, you see!) [That's a Napoleon Dynamite reference for my kids]

So it's my fondest hope that you'll dig what you hear (and, eventually, see) with This Birding Life. Digital content will never take the place of actually watching birds, but it might help us pass the hours between birding trips a little more easily.