Appetite for birding

A new iPhone app has bird lovers all a-twitter, which is not to say sharing rare sightings in 140 characters or less. While smart phone field guides are also pretty cool, that’s not what this is. BirdsEye lets anyone with an iPhone access the National Audubon Society’s and Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird, the biggest open-source database of bird sightings in Mexico and North America. It’s sent more than 1 million sightings a month, allowing for increased studies of birds and their habitats. It lists recently sighted birds, confirms sightings of rare or significant ones, and provides a map and directions to those sightings. So it doesn’t just tell you what the bird is, but where to see it.