Welcome to the birding and conservation
information service for Africa.

5th March 2005: African Birding Resources launched

This site provides information about Africa, each African country and its birds. Users are expected to be birders planning a visit to a country, tourists with an interest in birds, and people carrying out general research. It is not intended to be a replacement for travel guides, field guides, regional handbooks, birding magazines, conservation monographs and other sources of information.

The site will be developed and maintained as a major resource for birders. If you have visited a country recently and have information based on your own experience which might help keep the site up to date, please send it to info@africanbirdclub.org

You will almost certainly want to buy field guides and other books and we have provided links for you to buy these from our partner, Wildsounds, one of the largest specialist UK mail-order companies.

*** Wildsounds donates 5% of each order generated via these links to the ABC Conservation Fund. Please order here, get a good price and support ABC! ***

To select an African country, please click on the map or choose a country from the alphabetical drop-down list.

1st August 2005: African Bird Images launched at http://birdquest.net/afbid. Please take a look at this site and add your own high quality images of birds taken in Africa.

1st March 2007: Country checklists launched

The African Bird Club is pleased to launch a pilot country checklist project as an extension to its website. The checklists have been developed in conjunction with Bob Dowsett as a resource for the use of birdwatchers, ornithologists and other travellers in Africa and its associated islands. 49 checklists are available in the initial implementation.

The records contained in the sub-Saharan checklists are based on country lists in Dowsett, R.J. & Forbes-Watson, A.D. (1993) Checklist of Birds of the Afrotropical and Malagasy Regions, Volume 1: Species limits and distribution published by Tauraco Press, Liège, Belgium. These records were compiled from a number of referenced works and have been brought up to date with records published subsequently. The taxonomic sequence and naming conventions are those used by Bob Dowsett.

An alternative taxonomy based on the ABC checklist (January 2007 revision) is also available and is the only option for those countries not contained in Dowsett & Forbes-Watson (1993). The records for North African countries are based on lists which have been assembled from field guides, websites and other sources. In the initial implementation, the only checklists available for north of the Sahara are Egypt and Morocco.

We welcome feedback on what has been achieved so far and what you think can be done to improve the site. There are many developments which we can foresee and through time, we hope to make progress in the following areas: checklists for all countries in the region; addition of new records; inclusion of other languages; inclusion of other taxonomies and the addition of species details.

You will find the country checklists at checklists. We hope that you will use the checklists regularly and find them of value.

9th March 2008: Xeno-canto/Africa launched

We are pleased to announce a major new website for bird sounds of the African Region. This website is a derivative of xeno-canto, the leading website for the storage and retrieval of songs and calls of birds of the Neotropics. The development is a joint initiative between the xeno-canto designers and The African Bird Club and is supported long term by Naturalis, the National Museum of Natural History in The Netherlands.

You will find the new website at www.xeno-canto.org/africa or by following the links from the ABC home page. You will see that xeno-canto/Africa has comprehensive features which include powerful search and mapping capabilities, the ability to identify mystery songs and community search (which species sing at the same time?). It will be worth your while spending some time exploring the available functions.

The species list and naming conventions are those in the January 2008 version of the African Bird Club checklist and you can view or download a full copy of this checklist from the ABC website.

Users of xeno-canto/Africa are expected to be birders, ornithologists, researchers, tourists and anyone with a general interest in the birds of the region. Its ultimate success however is dependent on the expertise and goodwill of those of you who are prepared to share your recordings, as well as your knowledge and enthusiasm for African bird songs. We hope that many of you will register as members and begin to upload your recordings, help others with difficult identification challenges and try and solve mystery bird problems. The full capabilities of xeno-canto/Africa will become more useful of course as the number of members and recordings grows.

We view the website very much as a work in progress. The development work so far has concentrated on building a robust and functionally rich system but there is much more work to be done. We welcome your thoughts and comments (which you can post on the forum section of xeno-canto/Africa) as these will help us prioritise future developments.

We hope that xeno-canto/Africa will become a valuable resource for all people with an interest in the birds of the African Region. We also hope that you will enjoy using xeno-canto/Africa and will return to the site frequently, listen to new recordings and make use of its capabilities.

Acknowledgements

All the country information has been written or reviewed by country experts and over 50 people have been involved in writing over 500 pages of information about birds and birding in 'their' countries. Click on the contributors tab for a full list.

Last page update 9th March 2008