California Department of Fish & Game's
Life History Accounts and Range Maps
Provides range maps and basic biology fact sheets for virtually every species of amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammal in California. There’s a tremendous amount of information here. The life history accounts are loaded with well-cited information and lots of references. This site’s a good starting point if you want to learn more about a particular species. All the fact sheets and range maps are also available as PDF files that you can easily save to your computer for research convenience.
Note: Some of the range maps are inaccurate, greatly exaggerated, and sometimes outdated. For instance, the range map for bighorn sheep shows them in the Warner Mountains and Lava Beds National Monument. Though reintroduced to these regions in the last century (Lava Beds in 1971; Warners in 1980), the areas’ bighorn populations have since died out with pneumonia from domestic sheep being the presumed cause. The DFG map also shows bighorns contiguously ranging across the Mojave Desert and into the Sierra in a wide swath. Bighorns do occur in the Sierra and Mojave Desert but in scattered, isolated patches of habitat.
As with any source of information, if you find something that doesn’t seem right or seems old, don’t hesitate to cross-check it with something else.
Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology's Bird Species Accounts
Provides species accounts, range maps, sounds, and videos of North American birds. Great resource with massive amounts of information. Bird species are listed alphabetically and taxonomically, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find what you’re looking for. The Cornell species accounts are also backed with citations for their information sources.
Northern Wild Sheep & Goat Council
Want loads of scientific papers about North American wild sheep and mountain goats? Yes? Then this is your site. According to their homepage: “The Northern Wild Sheep and Goat Council is a non-profit, international scientific and educational organization dedicated to the management and conservation of northern wild sheep and mountain goat populations and their habitats in North America. The Northern Wild Sheep and Goat Council was established in 1968 by a group of scientists from the U.S. and Canada.”
In terms of research credibility, this site looks about as legit as they get. I actually met one of the executive committee members (Craig Foster) in 2005 when I was on a trip to videotape California bighorns in Oregon. Foster is hard-working and has been involved with various action-packed bighorn capture-and-transplant operations. The scientific articles are available for free downloading as PDF documents and are on the site’s “Proceedings” page. There are articles from 1970 through 2006.