Yesterday chandas tweeted one of the more technically awkward web pages I’ve seen in a while, but the content is great. It appears to be a rather large dictionary of bird names, saved as a single html page from a Microsoft Word file. It’s all text with no images or links, there’s no obvious indication of who wrote or compiled it (it’s hosted on the Weisblum Lab Antibiotics Webpage, where it’s linked to as “Arthur Smith’s Bird Dictionary”), and it weighs in at a browser-crashing 12 MB.

Once you get past that it’s chockablock with good stuff—bird names and their synonyms starting with Aasvogel (“the name for the larger vultures by the Dutch colonists in Africa”) and ending with Zeldonia, the generic name for the Wrenthrush. The whole thing is a good potential source for some of the better bird lists on Wordie.

UPDATE: This one must be making the rounds. Language Hat blogged it a few days ago.