James,
I think this has been done a few times before, but the results have not
been widely distributed. In an old CPN I remember reading about a
comprehensive CP index that someone did that printed out to several
inches of fan-fold paper. If you read through the back issues you may
be able to get a copy of this old computer index and bring it up to date.
For starting from scratch, one problem is that most of the CPN do not
have tables of contents, and the year-end indices are pretty sketchy.
You would probably want to go through each issue page by page and index
each photo, reference to each species, author, etc. For this you'd need
a complete set of back issues. If you'd like, I suppose I could loan
you mine.
Actually, if permission could be granted, it would be interesting to
just scan the complete text into computer. I imagine that each author
holds their own copyrights, though.
-- Rick