The BDI is slowly but steadily working through the bird species of South Africa producing structured species texts. For each bird species, the information is structured in the order we believe that it the most useful. A list of the species for which structured species texts have been completed is available here. We keep it up to date..
The first section describes how to identify the species. This is done with photographs. These are annotated with short sentences which describe the key features and with lines which point to them.
The annotated photograph above is from the structured species text for the Capped Wheatear.
This is the photographic identification guide for the Cape Sugarbird.
The secondmost useful information relates to the distribution of the species. We use maps created from the data in the Second Southern African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP2). There is a paper which describes, in fair detail, how to interpret these maps. It is Open Access and you can find it here.
The next section contains photographs of the habitats in which the species typically occurs.
The there are usually sections about behaviour and breeding, and sometimes there are further paragraphs dealing with other interesting aspects of the bird’s biology. Occasionally there is a photo gallery.
The final section points to other resources, such as the link to the pdf of the species text published in the first bird atlas. There are often references to useful Open Access papers about the species. It also provides the common name of the species in several languages.