Halbert Carmichael has been a bird watcher since 1944 and a coin collector since 1949. In 1964 he put the two hobbies together and began collecting coins from around the world with designs showing real bird species. In 1984 he began a listing of these designs in an Excel database. The list started with a little over a hundred designs and has grown to over nine hundred different designs and now includes more than four hundred identifiable species. The number of designs and issues has gotten completely out of hand for any one collector to collect. One limitation is to collect, as the title indicates, one coin for each possible species of bird. That is why many designs are not illustrated on this web site. While the number of issues from legitimate(?) governing bodies has increased, the number of issues from micro-states has exploded. e. g. Gough Island has a population of less than twenty-five South Africans manning a weather station. But, hey, the issue is cheap, and they are interesting birds. The number of colored, decalled, prismatic, and hologram issues that are not intended for circulation is also growing exponentially.