It is an absolutely beautiful early spring morning in Boston today: my walk to work was filled with the sounds of birdsong, the sight of plants started to poke through the leaf litter and that wonderful, elusive smell that only wafts in on a warm spring breeze. (Of course, true to New England form, it's going to rain this afternoon, but hey, we'll take what we can get).
Mornings like this usually make me feel a little bit guilty that I didn't get up much earlier and go out birding - I can do some by ear on my walk in, but not at the leisurely pace I'd prefer. So I was absolutely delighted to learn this morning from a report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the University of Pittsburgh's Darlington Digital Library has mounted the first complete digital version of John James Audubon's Birds of America: all 435 plates plus the accompanying text from the five-volume Ornithological Biographies.
I like the layout and design of the site, and I especially like that they have retained Audubon's original order of the birds (they were released to subscribers in batches of five, with each batch generally containing one large bird, one medium-sized bird, and three small birds).
