NEW RESOURCE for Midwestern U.S. birders

It's April 10, and you just saw a bird you think was a Blue-headed
Vireo. But is it too early for them? When do they migrate through,
anyway? Are any ever seen in the summer? Do they nest here?
Is this a rare bird here?

There is a new book on CD that is available to answer these questions
for you. It is "Brock's Birds of Indiana" by Kenneth J. Brock. It is
NOT a field guide, rather, it is an electronic book that summarizes a
huge amount of observational data over the past 50 years, for the 409
species of birds that have been observed in Indiana. Included for each
species are:

* A 12-month histogram showing how many records have been
obtained at what times of year (down to 10-day granularity)

* An abundance table showing how common the bird is in each of
three tiers (northern, central, southern), in each of the four seasons.

* Status (migrant only, summer resident, nester, winter resident, etc.)

* Migration envelope data showing record early arrival date, typical
arrival date, peak date, typical departure date, and record late
departure date for each of three tiers (northern, central, and
southern), for both spring and fall migrations.

* Most birds have a 50 year population trend graph, corrected and
normalized for observer effort, along with an analysis of whether
the species appears to be increasing or declining at statistically
significant rate.

* Some birds have a map of color-coded occurrence by county.

* Although it's not a field guide, there are excellent pictures of over
100 of the species.

You do not have to live in Indiana to find this data useful - it could
be very useful to birders in surrounding states as well, because this
kind of information is very difficult to come by. To my knowledge,
this is the only collection of information of it's kind available for any
area of the U.S.

You can see samples of this book online at:
http://www.amosbutleraudubon.org/brock_cd.htm
as well as get ordering information.


--
Randy



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