About this edition

The discs described the birds of the Atlantic forest region — São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and the coast between them — with descriptions, photographs, distribution notes and, unusually for a field guide, a large collection of the author's own field recordings of their vocalizations. The software that displayed all this ran on Windows and no longer runs. The material it displayed survives.

Recovering it meant reading the discs' own data files directly and decoding the text format the program used. That work is complete and its results are published here. It is not a perfect recovery, and this site tries to be honest about the difference between:

What the discs say

Text, names, captions and images read off the discs and shown as they stand — including their typographical errors and the places where a character could not be decoded.

What this site works out

Structure the discs imply but do not state: where one page ends and the next begins, which section of an account is which. Marked as such.

What is still open

Evidence that has not been settled — recordings that cannot be attached to a bird, two sources that disagree, a coordinate that cannot be read. Published rather than hidden.

What this website adds

Search, the family grouping, this page. Modern navigation, always labelled as such.

Where the three discs disagree — and they do, in their introductions, their bibliographies and their bird lists — none is treated as the correct one. Both readings are kept and each is named.