Surfbirds.com

It's time to bring you another Online Field Guide! These nature guides are very useful to those of you that don't have your own normal field guides in book form to take along with you, and even to some of you who do. The field guide that we will share this time is a bird guide for Britain and Europe. It's called Surfbirds.com.

The first thing we see at Surfbirds is that it's more of an online magazine at first glance than it is a field guide. It is also a full birding community where you can find news blogs and even an online forum. But don't worry, the guide is there, and it's a good one. We'll get to it soon.

You can find articles here about birding trips and identification. If you join the site you can not only write a birding specific blog if you'd like, but you can also upload your bird photos and videos, and share them with other users. Contributing to a site always helps make it better. You can explore more about site membership for yourself. We'll move on to the guide for now.

At the bottom right of the page you will find a section called Bird Identification. There are a few sections, including the guide, even a link to help identify birds in North America. But we want the UK guide right now. Click the ID Guide to Birds of Britain and Europe link to get to the guide.

What we find isn't fancy to look at, but it is highly functional. You can search by lists of bird families, types of birds, bird names, and habitat. But my favorite way is through answering a short series of questions about the description of your bird. These questions help narrow down what kind of bird you might have seen. Then takes you to a page with pictures and names of potential answers for you.

You don't get a lot of information from this guide when you find your bird. But the important thing is that you are able to identify it first, and this guide can help you do that well enough. After you know the name of your bird, it becomes much easier to find other information that you might want or need. We will cover places where you can get more of that information in future articles.

Go check out Surfbirds.com.


We are still looking for more online field guides every day. If you know of a good site with information on any feature in nature,share the link with us in the comments section. You may also leave a link to your own site if you have one. We will give credit to the first person that shares the link to a guide when we write the article for it. We are looking for guides from all over the world, so one for your area would be very helpful.