Ciblek Mania

This just in! Well, OK, it happened back around Halloween...

The digital edition of Bird Watcher's Digest (the magazine for which I humbly work as editor) has been awarded a Silver Award from the 2010 Digital Magazine Awards! Everyone here at the offices of BWD is buzzing with excitement over this award, so I just had to share it here on BOTB.

We've produced six issues of eBWD thus far and each one has helped us refine our thinking and offerings for the digital realm. One thing has remained constant: All subscribers to the print edition of Bird Watcher's Digest automatically get free access to our digital edition.
That's correct, amigo. If you subscribe to the print edition of BWD, you get access to eBWD as part of the deal. Feeling the urge? Subscribe now!

As we'd hoped, we have lots of people subscribing solely to eBWD, the digital-only edition. Increasingly readers want to receive their favorite content in some digital medium, and we're happy to oblige.

If you have not yet checked out our "award-winning digital edition" (it's neat to be able to say that) please do so. Some of the features that set our digital edition apart from a print magazine include:

• videos of featured bird species
• bird sounds and songs embedded into text links
• recordings of select authors reading their articles
• hot links throughout the content and advertisements for immediate exploration

But why read about eBWD when you can:

A: Go there yourself and sample some of the pages.

and/or

B: Watch a video in which I and (several of my well-dressed colleagues here at BWD) take you on a tour of eBWD. Here it is:



And remember it's not too late to get a BWD subscription as a holiday gift for that special someone who loves watching birds.

This summer I've spent a bit of time shooting high-definition video. I am a rank beginner and learning as I go, but it's been an incredibly fun new hobby.

So here is a handful of five-second snippets from the hours of video I've shot (most of which is undeniably deletable). I am saving a few choice clips for later sharing here and elsewhere, though it's tempting to let it all out at once.

I think my dream job would be to be the person who gets to film those "Charles Kuralt nature moments." No voice over, no on-screen graphics—just the imagery and natural sounds of some amazing phenomena: birds, animals, plants, or landscape. I remember his segments so clearly from the CBS Sunday Morning television show.

I hope you like my little montage of clips. There's lots more to come. Thanks for watching.