These days hundreds of people publish their Bird pictures on line for anyone to see using a web-browser. There are already close to 100000 bird images on the Web.

Recent improvements in affordable Digital Cameras make it more possible for many talented people to take really excellent pictures so the rate at which worthwhile pictures are being added is growing rapidly. In a few years there could be over a million!

Sifting through everything that's available and finding the best or those that interest you the most can be very time consuming, however: sometimes links don't hang around for too long before they're not available any more; even when they stay for a while you can usually only look at one picture at a time.

What you need is software that works with the existing web-browsers to let you find and save the existing links so that you can return to them quickly, and look at pics, videos and sounds from different sources at the same time. That's what The Birder's Notebook, in conjunction with The Birder's Explorer, lets you do. (And we've just added a Google search function to let you quickly search for available images with just one button click)

The Birder's Explorer is just a version of Internet Explorer. It doesn't do any more that Internet Explorer does already: every time you look at a picture or listen to a song the link is copied to your computer - its hidden away on your hard disc but its quite easy to find, it's not copy protected in any way and it doesn't get deleted immediately you log out.

When The Birder's Explorer retains a link it fully copy-protects it so that only you, using The Birder's Notebook can see or listen to it again. The copy protection is so solid that, if you have two different instances of The Birder's Notebook running in different folders on your computer, which you can, for instance if you have a special Multimedia Checklist set up, you can't transfer the links from one folder to the other and have the other instance of The Birder's Notebook read it (but you can Import the Multimedia Checklist using the main Birder's Notebook program).

In fact even more pictures and songs could be available on the Web if people were ready to pay a small amount for them and they were readily available over the Web in a fully copy-protected form. This is exactly what The Birder's Notebook makes possible. You could download a Multimedia Checklist containing all sorts of stuff in exactly the same way as you can download The Birder's Notebook. The text, pictures and songs will still be on the publishers web-site - until you click on the link! Why, one day we might even stop chopping forests down to publish Field Guides!