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You can spend an inordinate amount of time browsing the web. In fact, you
can spend so much time that it begins to interfere with truly important
activities, such as birding.
The Cincinnati Bird Club doesn't have its own web site (unless you count this one), so I've included
a page about the Cincinnati Bird Club.
Several local birding or other conservation organizations have home pages on the
web, including the Audubon Society of Ohio
(the Cincinnati chapter, so named because at the time of its founding, it was the only
Audubon Society in Ohio),
Gilmore Ponds,
Oxbow, Inc., and
RAPTOR, Inc.
Ohio Birder Resources
is a good starting point for information on birds and birding in Ohio.
The Dayton Audubon
Society has its own page, which contains information on birding just
to our north.
Information about birding in Indiana can be found at
Indiana Audubon Society, and information
about Kentucky is at the Kentucky Ornithological Society.
Looking beyond our region, the grand daddy of birding web sites, Jack Siler's
Birding
on the Web, is still active. And if you want a list
of nearly every bird-related web site there is, in your choice of French
or English, try Bird Links
to the World.
The Virtual Birder is
a unique site. Its centerpiece is a series of identification quizzes,
incorporated into virtual tours of famous birding locales. This site is very
graphics-intensive, so check it out at an off-peak time.
The U. S. Geological Survey operates
the North American Breeding
Bird Survey. This site has range maps, population trend maps, and lots
of other information on our breeding bird species, derived from the Breeding
Bird Survey. Switching to winter birds, the
Audubon Christmas Bird Count site
has some interesting presentations of that data.
Cincinnati Bird Club member Pete Thayer is the head of
Thayer Birding Software, publishers of a quality CD-ROM devoted to North
American birds, listing software, and other electronic goodies.
Apart from browsing the web, you can also fill your e-mail box to overflowing
with messages about birds and birding. Birdchat is a mailing list devoted
to the discussion of any and all topics relating to birding. You can place
yourself on this mailing list by sending e-mail to
listserv@listserv.arizona.edu.
Leave the subject line blank. The body of the message should contain just
the line "subscribe birdchat Your Name", where Your Name is your actual name,
and not your e-mail address. You don't need to tell the listserv your e-mail
address; it will capture it from the header that your e-mail program appends
to every message. The same listserv also contains mailing lists which are
limited to providing e-mail transcripts of local rare bird alert tapes. There
are three separate lists, for the eastern, central (that's us), and western
parts of the continent. You can subscribe to any or all of these lists by
including additional lines in your e-mail to the listserv. The proper commands
would be "subscribe birdeast Your Name", "subscribe birdcntr Your Name" (yes,
that's birdcntr, not birdcenter), and/or "subscribe birdwest Your Name".
You may send these commands together in one message, but each command should
be on a separate line.
Similar mailing lists are available which focus on Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana birds:
In the old days, before there was a World Wide Web, people used to communicate by making marks on paper.
When they put lots of marks on lots of pieces of paper, they called them "books". In case you're interested
here are some book reviews.
Finally, although it's not about birds, a site worth looking at is the
Cincinnati Wild Ones Chapter, which is all about
gardening with native plants.
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