1st May 2008: A few species photos from Mary Crickmore have been added to the Mali pages.
21st April 2008: African Bird Club is pleased to welcome Ben's Ecological Safaris to its growing list of Corporate Sponsors.
21st April 2008: ABC Annual Report 2007
Copies of the Annual Report and Accounts for 2007 and a copy of the revised Constitution have been added to the website and can be seen here.
7th April 2008: The African Bird Club Conservation Fund has provided over £67,000 for conservation projects in Africa since its inception. Most of the funds were provided by generous donations from sponsors and members.
The list of projects which have been supported has been updated and you can see this at Conservation Projects.
For each award, A brief summary is shown which includes the project title, recipient, the country and the amount. Some of the projects in the list are shown in italics and you can find further details of these by clicking on the project titles.
22nd March 2008: African Bird Club is pleased to welcome Gorilla Safaris to its growing list of Corporate Sponsors.
18th March 2008: References from Malimbus 30(1) have been added to the country pages.
9th March 2008: Announcement of xeno-canto/Africa
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.
3rd March 2008: The visiting pages of all countries have been updated with the planned tours of our Corporate Sponsors.
28th February 2008: African Bird Club is pleased to welcome MKA Ecology to its growing list of Corporate Sponsors.
16th February 2008: A new map which shows the distribution of the endemic birds of the Comoros Islands can be found at Comoros.
31st January 2008: The country checklists have proved to be extremely popular and there have been some 5,000 downloads since the system went operational about a year ago. We are pleased to inform you that a new version of the database is operational with 78 checklists. New country checklists have been added for Ascension, Comoros and islands, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, Prince Edward Islands, Rodrigues, Swaziland and Tristan da Cunha and islands.
There is now a checklist for all countries within the ABC region. The database which supports the checklists has around 100,000 entries and the ABC species list and taxonomy is consistent with Peter Lack's January 2008 ABC African checklist. We will continue to update the records with published and peer-reviewed information and add new functions to the operational system from time to time. You will find the country checklists at checklists.
27th January 2008: A number of photos of IBAs and species have been added to the Ghana pages.
19th January 2008: Finding the Endemic Kulikoro (Mali) Firefinch in Dogon Country
This interesting article and photographs by Mary Crickmore have been added to the Mali hotspots page.
8th January 2008: The Gambia pages have undergone a major revision by incorporating information from the Gambia Birding Group.The Gambia Birding Group is a not for profit organisation which: provides information about practical aspects of visiting The Gambia for wildlife trips and about birding throughout The Gambia; supports conservation for wildlife; provides contact points for birders and naturalists visiting The Gambia. Because of falling membership, the Gambia Birding Group is unable to remain a cost effective organisation, is being wound up and transferring its assets to the African Bird Club but you can still visit its website at Gambiabirding for the foreseeable future.
4th January 2008: The Gambia conservation page has been completely rewritten and work is in progress to update the visiting page.
31st December 2007: A significant update of The Gambia hotspots page has been completed.
27th December 2007: Recent sightings have been added to the news sections of Tunisia and Uganda.
19th December 2007: Recent sightings have been added to the news sections of Tanzania and Togo.
17th December 2007: Recent sightings have been added to the news section of South Africa.
14th December 2007: Recent sightings have been added to the news sections of Senegal, Seychelles and Sierra Leone.
10th December 2007: Recent sightings have been added to the news sections of Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia and Niger.
8th December 2007: Recent sightings have been added to the news sections of Libya, Madeira, Mali and Mauritania.
6th December 2007: Recent sightings have been added to the news sections of Ethiopia, The Gambia, Ghana and Kenya.
13th November 2007: Recent sightings have been added to the news sections of Cape Verde Islands, Central African Republic, Congo (Brazzaville) and Egypt.
8th November 2007: Recent sightings have been added to the news sections of Cameroon and Canary Islands.
5th November 2007: Recent sightings have been added to the news sections of Azores, Benin and Botswana.
25th September 2007: The ABC websites have been updated with the latest species status from BirdLife International. References from Malimbus 29(2) have been added to the country pages. The ABC representatives have been updated on the country pages.
13th September 2007: The country checklist pages have been updated to include new lists for the Algeria, Canary Islands, Madeira, Réunion, The Seychelles and Aldabra as well as new records for several other countries. You will find the country checklists at checklists.
29th August 2007: Launch of ABC Forum
The African Bird Club is pleased to launch a discussion Forum which focuses on birds and birding in Africa at http://www.africanbirdclub.org/phorum/ or by following the link from the home page. We do not believe that there is an equivalent Forum on the internet dedicated to the birds of all Africa.
The Forum objectives are as follows:
- to provide the capability for interactive discussion on all aspects of birds of the African region;
- to provide a facility to document recent sightings and share photos;
- to provide help with species identification, travel, taxonomy issues etc;
- to be able to incorporate sound, video and new technologies as we move forward;
- to build a database of information with comprehensive search capabilities.
An analysis of AfricanBirding e-mails has to a large extent determined the topic structure of the Forum. We will continue to run AfricanBirding in parallel with the Forum and post its e-mails into the Forum. That way, much useful information will be stored in the Forum database and will be available for subsequent searches. We would expect however that the additional capabilities of the Forum will mean that the majority of AfricanBirding users will post to the Forum directly in future.
The Forum has been set up with some posts which you can read immediately. In order to reply to items or post new topics, you will need to register. The link ‘About the Forum’ provides more information including how to register.
We hope that you make frequent use of the Forum and find it a valuable addition to the Club’s informative and popular website. Please contact us at forum@africanbirdclub.org if you have any questions or problems.
29th August 2007: The contents of ABC Bulletin 14(2) have been added to the bulletin and country pages.
24th August 2007: Links have been added for our new corporate sponsor Birding Ecotours.
18th August 2007: Links have been added for our new corporate sponsors Access Africa and Adventure Trails
2nd August 2007: Recent sightings have been added to the news section of Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
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