TABLE OF CONTENTS If you were a nineteenth-century ornithologist and wanted to identify an unfamiliar bird, you generally had to be a pretty good shot the standard of binoculars and telescopes was then just so poor. In fact, pick any leading Victorian ornithologist and you ll find that he (yes, invariably he) was quite handy with the rifle. Nowadays, as with big-game hunters, the rifle-toting birdwatcher is thankfully a fading memory, only to be replaced by an army of recreational birders wielding nothing more harmful than the latest bins, scopes, digital cameras, DV cameras, motorized lenses, PDAs, and digital sound gear, not to mention the obligatory designer birding jacket and pants. Well, at least the wee birds don t get hurt anymore, although sometimes I wonder what they make of it all.
When this lot come home, they no longer worry about how to keep the cat away from their catch before they get down to the taxidermist. Instead, they are faced with a whole new set of concerns: how to identify, label, and organize the hundreds of digital images, movie clips, sound clips, and field notes that comprise the catch. The digital photography of birds has become so popular that an entire new subculture known as digiscoping has evolved around the activity of taking pictures with a digital camera stuck on the end of a telescope!
In fact, come to think of it, birds have to be the perfect subject for the new digital media collector: they form photogenic subjects...
