Home & Garden News

Copyright 2005 Duncraft, Inc. All rights reserved.

"It's nearly Fall Migration season--a great time to see a colorful array of birds in your yard and enjoy the variety of birds passing through your area en route to their winter destination. If you spot an unfamiliar bird, go to the Online Bird Guide to learn the identity of your new feathered friend."

CONCORD, NH (PR WEB) -- Duncraft, the largest birdfeeding cataloger in the nation, is pleased to present this effective search engine for identifying North American birds. Mitchell Waite, the developer of the Ultimate Online Bird Guide, designed this 'intelligent' tool to be a systematic, step-by-step approach for bird identification. How is this identification search different? Mitchell explains, "The most popular search engine on the net scans the web and gives you back links to sites that may or may not be relevant to the text you entered. With the Online Bird Guide, you don't type any text, and it doesn't search the web, rather you click on icons and it scans its built-in database."

Waite continues, "You select just one characteristic of the bird at a time--and that makes all the difference! For example, let's say you begin your selections with 'location'. You are presented with all the states, provinces, coasts and islands in North America. You select the 'location' where you saw the bird, say California, and then the search engine presents you with a list of all the birds that are in California. We call these results 'matches'. Now, continue to narrow down your matches and select a second attribute, let's say 'size'. As you go through this process, defining key attributes of your mystery bird, the number of 'matches' is reduced until you get your answer. Other online engines require you to enter all the ID information and attributes upfront--and at the same time. Your result is either 'zero matches' or far too many matches to sift through."

Is it still necessary for the user to do a lot of clicking with this search engine? "Not really," says Mitchell. "Almost any bird can be identified with just a few clicks--especially if you've been observant and noticed a distinguishing feature. There are over 50 different attributes in the bird database that you can search on, and there are over 700 different birds. Finding a bird usually takes a few minutes at most."

You can try out the Ultimate Online Bird Identification Search Engine at www.duncraft.com. Simply click on the banner at the top of homepage. Duncraft suggests you add this URL to your "favorites"...so if you are baffled by the identity of a winged newcomer to your yard, you can dash to your computer and quickly launch the search--while the birds' color, size, shape etc. are fresh in your memory.