Great-Spotted-Woodpecker

Great-Spotted-Woodpecker-Furen

Based on its decades of work in developing countries, WICE has come to the conclusion that visitation of protected areas is indispensable for their conservation. Areas with little or no visitation are under far greater pressure than those that enjoy significant visitation. Over the years it has sought for ways of promoting interest in protected areas in developing and transition countries.  In 1997, I was attending a training course in software use and web site development, and one of my instructors showed a website that - at the time - had some of the heaviest traffic on the internet. So he thought, how I can I put that knowledge to use for promoting visitation to protected areas. So I though how I could get the attention of the most enthusiastic nature travelers, the birdwatchers, then he could help them find those areas and thus contribute to their conservation by having bird watchers visit protected areas in developing countries. Knowing that birders want the national checklist of the birds of the country they are going to visit, I figured that I could get your attention by providing the national bird list of every country of the world in one website. Once having your attention, the website could then show information on the protected areas of the country of your interest and eventually ways on how to visit them. That was the idea behing Birdlist and Nature Worldwide and the reason why I created the website. 

Although, some countries are still missing, we can proudly say that we currently cover about 80% of the countries of the world and 90% of the world's land mass.  We know that our lists are not yet complete and often based on potential distribution rather than confirmed observations, but we continuously get emails with corrections and official up-to-date bird lists. In fact those emails are very important in motivating us and that is why we continue providing more information about birds, national parks and nature in general.