Four products in one, covering every species seen fewer than 150 times in Britain: A video guide A database of past sightings An index to British Birds and Birding World A reference work Price: £5 (plus £3.95 p&p)

Almost 400 video clips

This is the most comprehensive collection of video clips yet published on the rarest birds seen in Britain. It includes highlights of the footage previously published in the Birding Plus series of videos featuring shots of actual rarities as seen in the UK. For the first time, this unique and historic material is presented in one package, with every video clip almost instantly accessible. This includes almost 140 of the 'famous' birds seen during the 1990s such as:

• Grey-tailed Tattler, Burghead, November 1994
• Cedar Waxwing, Nottingham, February 1996
• Red-flanked Bluetail, Holy Island, April 1995
• Slender-billed Curlew, Druridge Bay, May 1998
• Ivory Gull, Alborough, December 1999
• Alpine Accentor, Rimac, November 1994

 Full list of videos on the CD-ROM

The rest of the video footage is taken from the BirdGuides library, including birds filmed in America, China and many parts of Europe. These enable you to study almost every species in detail thanks to the top-quality equipment used. Here are some of the gorgeous birds you will see in action on the disk:

Spanish Sparrow, Waterside, Cumbria, July 1996	Baillon's Crake, Lundy, May 1995
Desert Wheatear, Cley, Norfolk, November 1994	Pied-billed Grebe - BirdGuides archive footage

A database of past sightings

• How many accepted sightings have there been of Pied-billed Grebe?
• Where were they?
• When?
• Is there a seasonal pattern to their occurrences?
• How are the sightings spread across the country?
• How many sightings have been in Yorkshire?

Normally, to get the answers to these questions you'd have to search through over 40 years of reports published annually in the journal British Birds or you could buy one of the several published attempts to summarise these sightings. The problem with such published works is that they are massive, expensive, difficult to analyse and, inevitably, out of date. If you subscribe to our Bird News Extra service service, you can access the Online Guide to Rarer British Birds, containing up-to-date data.

For every species, the database on the disk will give you:

• A page of text with an illustration and (in most cases) at least one video clip:
  
  
  NB: this screenshot is shown smaller than actual size
  
• A complete list of every accepted sighting in Britain and Ireland since records began (i.e. including all the historical sightings prior to 1958 as well as all those published in British Birds since then). Each entry gives details of where and when the bird was seen and a reference to where further details have been published.
• The ability to search for records of any species in any county, presented like this:
  
  
  NB: this screenshot is shown smaller than actual size
   
• Instantly accessible graphs to show the distribution of sightings of any species month-by-month or year-by-year:
  
  
   
• Pie charts to show the age and sex distribution of all the accepted records:
  
  
   
• A map showing how the sightings have been scattered across the country on a county-by-county basis:
  
  
   
• A list of all the previously accepted records that are now considered unacceptable.
• Alternatively, you can search the entire database by county, so you will get a list of all the rarities seen in any county.

Find any article or photo from British Birds or Birding World

Have you ever tried to find a particular article that you remembered seeing in Birding World some time ago? If you have, you'll presumably know that it can be a very time-consuming process. Not any more. This disk includes a family-by-family index covering all Western Palearctic species. Click on any family name and a list will appear of all the relevant articles, notes and photos published in either British Birds or Birding World/Twitching since 1971, telling you in which volume and on what page you'll find the information you want.

All you need to know about each species

Each species also has a comprehensive text covering identification, voice, status and distribution by Yorkshire birder Russell Slack and details of the first British record by Phil Palmer, based on his book Firsts for Britain.

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