All posts tagged with birds

This week we’re going to do our book of the week a little differently. We came across this awesome tool on the National Geographic website called Backyard Bird Identifier. By answering some simple questions about a bird that you have seen in either the U.S. or Canada, the application tells you the possible species. We thought that was pretty cool, so we decided to see if this tool could identify birds based on answers that we give solely by looking at the illustrations and associated descriptions in one of the books in our collection.

Summer is in full swing and that means all the gardeners have already started coming out of the woodwork to get their hands dirty. We came across this book in BHL and thought it would be an appropriate book of the week for all of our garden-loving friends: 1000 Hints on Flowers and Birds (1917), by Mae Savell Croy.

In our last post, our featured user Mathew Louis named The Ibis as his favorite title in BHL. Thus, we decided to feature this entire series as our “book of the week” this week. Not only is The Ibis full of valuable information on birds, it’s also loaded with beautiful illustrations, many of which are featured in Mathew Louis’ website.

This week we feature one of our users that has taken a particular interest in BHL for the purpose of images, using BHL to strengthen the collection of scientific illustrations found on his website. As our users have long shown a specific interest in the images associated with BHL content, we expect that this post, and the work of our featured user, Mathew Louis, will prove to be particularly interesting to our user community.

Scientific Breakthrough Alert! Recent studies have revealed that we may soon be seeing dinosaurs again in our modern age! How is this possible? One scientist has found that birds, the closest living relatives to the behemoths that have so completely captured the imagination of humans, are showing signs of de-evolution, reverting back to the forms of their dinosaur ancestors.

The concept of threatened and endangered species is not a new idea for most of the world. Most are now well aware of the shadow that looms over so much of the magnificent life on our planet. While many efforts are underway around the globe to protect the species that are threatened, it is important to continue to raise awareness of the plight faced by so many of the creatures that share our planet.