This MacNews Category Review looks at Mac software for birding and bird watching. Products covered are Big Lister, BirdItaly, Wings and Thayer Birding.

Big Lister

Big Lister (http://www.biglister.com/) is a birding software application that allows you to keep records of bird sightings, create a lifelist, and print checklists for the North American Continent. Big Lister gives you flexibility with your record keeping. You can choose to simply record when and where the bird was seen or you can be a big lister and store count, location, vocalization, equipment, observer, date, time, weather, habitat and description records. Bulk entry allows you to record all the common data for your day's sightings at one time.

BirdItaly (http://www.maudoc.com/) is a FileMaker database for bird watchers.

Wings (http://web.mac.com/wings_4d/Wings/Welcome.html) lets you record your bird sightings and the supporting location, taxonomic, observer and source data. You can choose from the AOU checklist of the birds of North and Middle America or the Sibley and Monroe checklist of the birds of the world.

Thayer Birding (http://www.thayerbirding.com/) includes an electronic field guide that sings, the ability to export songs and photos to your iPod, multiple color photos for each bird, features for indentifying unknown birds, side-by-side comparisons, quizzes, The Birder's Handbook, screensavers and more.

Also Bento from FileMaker Inc. (http://www.filemaker.com) has a free template that's good as is, but you can modify it easily. If you wish, you can bring in photos (yours or stock images)and birdsongs, along with recording siting data.

Additionally, there are two iOS apps -- iBird and BirdsEye -- available at the Apple App Store.

Finally, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a web site (http://ebird.org/content/ebird/) that offers birding and bird watching news and features.