Mega-links Websites

Fatbirder is a Signpost to Birding Websites Worldwide

When I started Fatbirder in 1997, I did so because nothing like it existed – I wanted a website that pointed me to websites about birding, which wasn’t run by a search engine that could be manipulated. Afterwards, a whole plethora of such sites seemed to multiply across the internet. Nearly three decades on and most have fallen by the wayside – just keeping them up-to-date like fatbirder is, seems to be too much hassle. Recently sites like WorldTwitch and Surfbirds seemed to have stopped operating.

There also used to be many different search engines competing for your attention… now almost everyone uses Google, so much so that its name has entered the dictionary as a synonym for searching the web. But, on that platform you can pay to push your site to the first ten and some ‘portmanteau’ sites, that carry hardly any information, vie for your attention just to bombard you with marketing. Many so called search engines are no more than data collecting marketing machines too. Commerce r8ns the web and, sadly, there is no search engine equivalent of Wikipedia. AI is making this even more worrying to me, as faith is put in answers that can be spectacularly wrong.

Signpost sites like Fatbirder declined so much that most people wanting someone to point the way to trip reports, overseas birding, their state’s birding resources etc., now take a look at our site. Why? Because Fatbirder.com is constantly updated, corrected and modified to suit birders everywhere. Like Wikipedia it is contributed to by many people, but Fatbirder is centrally curated, and contributions vetted and edited before publication. Moreover, local information is supplied by local people wherever possible, and other information supplied by experts in their field.

Yellow-billed Kingfisher Syma torotoro – ©Dubi Shapiro

The links below are resource pages… websites with lots of links to other birding websites or to information sources for ornithologists or about individual species of birds. They are places to visit and to start your search… especially those that have a special angle. Like Fatbirder, many of these sites carry links to the rest of the world –  none of us can be truly comprehensive as websites come and go daily, but, if you can’t find what you are after on Fatbirder you may find something useful through one of the sites listed below.

Beware, as not all such sites keep their information as up-to-date as Fatbirder does…

I also find it a tad frustrating when some sites turn out to be no more than hard to navigate search engines – [portmanteau sites that index everything, but say nothing]. Some rely on minimalist, shallow copy supplied by full-time content writes who know nothing about the subject they write about, relying on sites like fatbirder.com to glean their information and present it as their own!

If anyone knows of other really large links sites like these, as always, mail Fatbirder with details.