Bird watching in 1942

Yesterday I came across a rather sad and battered looking bird book in a second hand bookshop in York, U.K. The title is A First Guide to South African Birds by E. Leonard Gill. Bird books, especially old bird books are a particular favourite of mine and so you can imagine how delighted I was when I saw that the book had over 20 beautiful colour illustration plates of birds. However, a closer inspection showed that the owner had not only ticked the species that she had seen but listed the date of when she had first seen them in the back of the book. The owner's name was Margaret and she was given the book at Christmas 1941 by Dorothy & Reg. The dates for the bird observations began in January 1942.

The price of this treasure? - £7.50. I snapped it up immediately and took it home to join my natural history collections. I look forward to carefully studying the book and it's hand written notes.

What would be cool is a website for bird watchers and ornithologists like the old weather site which is using volunteers to transcribe weather reports from old ship's logs so climatologists can use the data. I

2 > That would be fascinating! I am a sincere if somewhat incompetent bird watcher. I'd love to know what birds were around where I was growing up, for example.

There's an app for that! http://ebird.org/content/ebird/