A Thousand Photos Added to All About Birds

Back in April when we launched the new version of our All About Birds website, we picked 51 common species and gave them the full treatment: expanded ID and life history information, sound and video clips, related links, and lots of photos of each bird in all (or nearly all) its plumages.

But commenters fairly soon started asking us for more photos of the other 532 species in our online species guide—birds that aren’t quite as common but still come in a variety of plumages: juvenile, immature, male, female, breeding, nonbreeding, dark-morph, light-morph, rufous-morph, and so on. We had a stockpile of some of these photos that used to be on our website, but owing to our new database structure we couldn’t incorporate them at launch.

So today we’re glad to announce that we’ve restored all 1,000 or so of those photos (including about 60 new photos of nests and eggs) to All About Birds. They flow seamlessly into the new site’s photo viewer, which means you can enlarge each photo and scroll through the collection until you find the plumage you’re looking for.

This doesn’t mean we’ll stop adding photos to All About Birds. The incredible photographers in our Flickr group, Birdshare, have now sent us more than 27,000 photos to work with, and we’re still intent on incorporating them into the species guide for the benefit of bird watchers everywhere. In the next few days, look for updates to Gambel’s Quail, Evening Grosbeak, Pine Grosbeak, Pileated Woodpecker, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, and other birds. Thanks and good birding!

(Thanks to France Dewaghe and Greg Delisle for handling the technical side of this upgrade.)