Canberra Bird Notes

Welcome to the Canberra Ornithologists Group's Online Canberra Bird Notes (CBN).

All past CBN volumes have been scanned, digitised and loaded up onto this website as full-text, searchable PDFs, and are available to members and non-members of the Canberra Ornithologists Group (COG) free of charge. The process has taken COG member Alastair Smith 10 months, and comprises 150 volumes and some 5,100 pages - a mammoth task indeed! Thank you very much Alastair for all of your hard work - it is much appreciated.

A Brief History

The CBN began its life with issue No.1 in July 1968, with the following Editorial:

"The Canberra Bird Notes is being produced as a news letter for members of the Canberra Branch of the R.A.O.U. and other interested persons. It is intended purely as an informal medium of communication and does not constitute a recognised journal. Publication will be every three months and numbering of issues will be consecutive, without volumes. Each issue will be page numbered separately." (CBN, No.1 July 1968)

In April 1970 the Canberra Branch of the R.A.O.U became the Canberra Ornithologists Group (COG) “with no change in aims, activities or administration" (CBN, No.7 April 1970).

The CBN too was evolving. The decision was made to publish CBN in volumes, leading to the first 13 issues, from July 1968 to October 1971, becoming Volume 1. Subsequent volumes were to comprise 8 issues, although for various reasons, Volumes 2 and 3 comprised 12 issues. In fact only Volume 4 ever did have just 8 issues. From Volume 5, four issues published in a calendar year became the norm. This too has now changed: from Volume 32, only three issues will be published each year.

How to Use This Site

To view a CBN, use the menu bar to the left and scroll down until you see the volume you require. Click on the link to show icons representing each issue of CBN, then click on an icon to display the PDF on the page. You can then access the PDF as you would any normal PDF, and with the normal utilities of your PDF reader program available to you: ie, printing, saving, navigation, and viewing options, etc. Note that some issues are quite large, and any over 3 megabyte have been highlighted with a "LARGE" warning.

In time, you will be able to use the Google Search box at the bottom of each screen to search the entire collection of CBNs for terms or expressions. The results will list all occurrences of the search terms and enable you to select and view any of the CBNs containing those terms.

Click Home at the top of the menu bar to return to this screen.

Full text PDF versions of all past CBNs have now been scanned. PDFs of new editions will be loaded onto this website as they become available - these will be electonic versions as printed, and will not be scanned. Please read the following advice before using any data from the scanned volumes.

How NOT to Use this Site

It should be noted that these volumes have been scanned-in using OCR (optical character recognition) software, which is by no means perfect. Scanning and formatting errors have been made and have resulted in the text and layout in some instances not matching that of the printed edition. We thought it was more important to get the volumes up first, and then pick up errors at a later date.

IT IS IMPORTANT therefore that if you are using data from Canberra Bird Notes, please refer to the original PRINTED edition as there is no guarantee that data has scanned correctly.

If you have any difficulties using this site, please contact the COG Webmaster.