Collins Bird eGuide

What else might you take out birding in addition to optics and photographic equipment? A notebook, field guide (out of sight if you don’t want others thinking you’re a dude) and perhaps a CD player? All three can be found combined on the recently updated version of the Collins Bird eGuide software, which runs on a pocket PC or PDA.

The Collins Bird eGuide is based on the most popular and arguably the best field guide for Britain and Europe ever produced – the Collins Bird Guide. All the text and plates from the book, covering in excess of 750 species, are here. In addition, more than 780 sound recordings from 473 species are provided. You can buy the eGuide as either a compact flash (CF) card or secure digital (SD) card – both are 256 MB and the CF version is slightly more expensive. Neither use any of your pocket PC’s integral memory.

There is just enough documentation to install and register and a help file is available when the software is running. A warning here: this package only works with the latest pocket PC operating systems – either Pocket PC 2003 or Windows Mobile 2005.

Is this software good enough to replace your field guide, CDs and notebook in the field? There are two ways to look up a species, the ‘Species List’ or by selecting one of the ‘Family Pictures’. I found the ‘Species List’ more intuitive, and quicker than searching a book index. Selections came up before keying in the full name – ‘war’ brought up ‘warblers’ – and after selecting a species from the list of warblers, the full list of warblers was still available on-screen to cycle through for direct comparison. This is almost as good as comparing similar species next to each other in the book, and also applies to the descriptions (text size adjustable), distribution maps and songs.

On the downside, text on the plates was difficult to read, especially on bright days. Playing sounds produced excellent results using travel speakers, though some rarer species are not available and there is no way to add your own recordings. You cannot stop a song once started, as I embarrassingly discovered when testing Common Crane calls near birders at Stubb Mill, Hickling, when no cranes were present! So on the field guide and CD front the eGuide is a good substitute for the ‘real thing’.

However, the bird log is very rudimentary. No listing of totals is possible and there is no field for entering single-species counts. Records can only be entered from the individual species screen, so it is necessary to keep going back to the ‘Species List’ to select the next species for data entry, which is laborious. Exporting sightings to other bird recording software is not easy. Overall, you may find it better to use an alternative recording system on your pocket PC.

The eGuide is about twice as expensive as the Collins Bird Guide and a set of bird song CDs combined, and you need to already have a pocket PC (most cost upwards of £250 but can be found for about £80 secondhand on eBay). Nevertheless, you may feel that the convenience of having this great field guide – along with a set of quality bird sounds – in the palm of your hand easily outweighs the cost.

First published in Birdwatch 166: 52 (April 2006). For a wide range of birding books, some at excellent discount prices, please take a look at the Birdwatch Bookshop.

Tech spec

• Collins Bird eGuide (v1.1a) by Killian Mullarney, Lars Svensson, Dan Zetterström and Peter J Grant (Collins/WildSounds, Salthouse, 2005).
• 256 MB holding 400 pages of text, more than 3,500 illustrations, 750 distribution maps and 780 sounds (of 470 species).
• £99.95.