Introduction

Hello blogosphere!

My name (as can be easily determined) is Andrew, and I am a Canadian bird enthusiast and amateur photographer. I have been birding for about 2 years, and taking bird photographs for somewhat longer than that. I am often asked how I got into birding, so I will relate that story along with my limited birding experience.

I have been taking photographs of various things for about 12 years, starting with a manual film camera, then a digital point & shoot, and now a digital SLR. I currently use a Nikon D50 with a cheap Sigma 70-300 lens for bird pictures. I started photographing birds as a challenge for myself when I started to be interested in wildlife photography.

I first started keeping records of my birding activities in May of 2007. My in-laws, Ron and Lynda, took me to a wood lot in town to look for some early warblers. I saw a Scarlet Tanager and a couple of warblers, and have been keeping track ever since.

I should mention that Ron and Lynda have a lot of birding experience, with something in the neighbourhood of 400 North American life species. I am lucky to have such a good birding resource close at hand - and it does come in handy.

Since that day in May I have recorded 140 life species, and taken photographs of 136 of them. My newest addition was yesterday, and will be the subject of another post. I have written several programs for keeping my lists, the first being a PHP program with a MySQL database. Although I no longer use this program, I have set up and maintained a copy for my father-in-law that he uses for his life list and year lists.

I have two current projects in various states of usefulness. First, a GTK program for my Nokia Internet Tablet that provides a good interface to XML lists. Second is a Qt program that I can run on my desktop or tablet with an SQL backend. My goal is to release one or both of these as open source programs one day.

Enough for now. More information will be forthcoming.