u/Working_Cucumber415

As someone who was born in the 90's I grew up with Pokemon and always loved the "collectible" aspect of completing the Pokedex. Of course the closest thing we have to that is birding and it's one of the reasons that got me into this hobby.

Now, one of the reasons I decided to create this book was because it's something I wanted for myself and couldn't find. Most lists are just boring, simple names with a checkmark in front, I wanted something more durable and more tangible, an actual pokedex that I could keep for life.

This list in particular is very hard to complete but not impossible, and that's by design. It's supposed to be a checklist for life. It contains all of the birds that can be found in the UK, even the very rare ones as long as they have been regularly observed over the last years. Rare vagrants are excluded though and have their own section as an appendix.

I did all of the research myself, mostly by looking at official records and public databases to decide the appropriate tags and what birds to include or exclude.

I did use AI to help with the images, I know some people don't like this but I made sure that all birds are accurately depicted. I would've preferred to hire an artist if I could but drawing 300+ birds would've cost a small fortune for something I'm not expecting to profit from, and this way I have more control on the illustration style and the individual characteristics of each bird which a non-birder artist would probably miss.

All-in-all, I just wanted to share since I've spent many many hours on this and I am really happy with the final result now that I got to see the printed version. I am selling this on Etsy with pretty much no profit since printing a hardcover colored book is so expensive, I won't share the link because I don't want to spam you guys but you can easily find it there if you are interested.

Let me know what you think!

This probably doesnt have a big market, especially because it's niche inside a niche, but it's my hobby and I enjoyed making these and hope to make more.

They're intended to be kind of like Pokedexes for birdwatchers. Each takes about 2 months to finish.

NY Version:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/4483233692/new-york-bird-checklist-bird-watching

UK Version
https://www.etsy.com/listing/4505978074/uk-bird-watching-checklist-life-list-log

EDIT: I see that people feel very strongly about the use of AI in this book so I want to say a few thing about that.

First: This is book is not art and is not advertised as such. This book has didactic and practical purposes. The images are there to show what the birds look like, not to flex my art skills.

Second: I didn't just prompt the AI to make me a book. I spent over 200 hours on each of these books, a big part was with the images sure but there was also lot's of research involved to make sure each classification is accurate and true and to make sure each bird belongs in the list and there's no birds missing. And I didn't just ask the AI to do this for me, I actually manually researched each bird individually on public databases to check how often they are sighted, and official channels to know what the correct status and classification is. I'm a birder, not an artist.

It would've been a lot less effort to just use images from a public database, but the focus of the book is not the images, it's the practical purpose it serves for birders. I made this for me at first and I thought other people might like it as well.

As a bird watcher I felt like it would be cool to have a kind of physical Pokédex that could motivate me to try to complete. And I couldn't quite find what I was looking for so Idecided to try and make one myself.

First I made one for the state of NY to see if there was any market for it. I finished it about a month and a half ago and this week I finished the UK version.

I got 2 sales so far on Etsy. I don't think there is a big market for this, but it's niche inside a niche so I wasn't expecting to 😄

I tried to make something out of my hobby and I'm actually proud of the result even if it doesn't sell much.

I won't spam you with links but if you want to know more you can always ask : )