Here birdy birdy birdy!

Episode 6: Birding Apps

October 31, 2021 Inez de Tucson Season 1 Episode 6
Here birdy birdy birdy!
Episode 6: Birding Apps
Show Notes Transcript

Are you ready to explore some new apps for birding? In this episode, I'll reveal the best (and worst) birding apps I discovered this past month.

Important links for this episode:

Transcript of this episode.

Sullivan, B., Wood, C., Iliff, M.J., Bonney, R.E., Fink, D., Kelling, S. (2009, May). e-Bird: A citizen-based bird observation network in the biological sciences. Biological Conservation: 142, p. 2282-2292.

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HBBB Episode 6: Birding Apps Review

Well hello there everyone and welcome to the 6th episode of Here birdy birdy birdy - the podcast that brings you a veritable vegetable soup of birding topics. In this episode, I’m going to review a couple of the best and worst birding apps out there.  

Before we begin though I’m excited to announce the Here Birdy Birdy Birdy Facebook Group! If you’re a follower of the Here Birdy Birdy Birdy Facebook page, you will have received an invitation already. If not, you can find us searching on  Facebook for the group “herebirdybirdybirdy” - that’s all one word all lower case h-e-r-e-b-i-r-d-y-b-i-r-d-y-b-i-r-d-y. 

Some of my listeners ask more questions about a show or want to continue a conversation, so I’m starting this group to build a community of birders across the country - whether you’re someone who notices birds once in a while or someone who got interested during the pandemic or someone who’s been a birder for years. If you’re unfamiliar with how Facebook groups work, unlike the Facebook page where only I can post, a group allows members to post to the newsfeed, create topics for short or ongoing discussions, and interact with each other. This group is private, I’ll need to approve everyone who wants in, so it will only be us bird nerds in there.

Speaking of our community, right now, I’m looking for birders of all ilks interviews for my December podcast. If you’d like to be one of our featured guests, let me know. I’d love to talk to you! 

OK, let’s get started with my reviews. So, I’ve been using the same two birding apps on my phone-iBird and e-bird -for a while, and by a while, I mean years and years. I tried using the Merlin app a few years ago and got so frustrated with it, I deleted it from my phone, but I’ve heard really good things about Merlin these days so I thought I’d give it another shot and while I was at it, why not try out a few more to see what’s out there. 

The first one I tried out is one called, Larkwire. Larkwire is only available on the Apple iOS and I stumbled on it while I was searching the App Store for “birding.” P.S. if you search for just bird in the App Store or Google’s Play Store, you’re going to come up with a lot of angry birds stuff, so type in “birding” instead. So Larkwire isn’t a field app that you would take out with you, but rather it’s a game you can play to learn bird sounds. There’s a basic free backyard birds version that has 18 common birds on it. The game works like this: You get images of four birds and a play button. When you hit play, a bird song plays and you tap the image of the matching bird. If you’re right a green segment shows up next to the bird and if you’re wrong a red segment shows up next to the incorrect bird and a green segment shows up next to the correct bird. So you get instant feedback about your choices whether you’re correct or incorrect. Once you get 5 green segments next to each bird the game is over, but beware, you might get some birds more than 4 or 5 times. So, there are five categories to start out with, songs with rough tones, clear-toned songs, backyard songs, urban songs, and forest songs. That’s also a browse setting if you want to see the bird and the song together, you can just sit, listen and learn. 

Beyond the basic 18 birds, you can purchase either a core course pack for ten dollars or a full course for $25 dollars. I haven’t downloaded any of these, but I think the concept is awesome. There were two I kept confusing - yellow warbler and common yellowthroat, but by listening over and over, I have a better idea of who’s who. I also learned that I almost cannot hear cedar waxwings’ high-pitched tones anymore. Wahhh!  

While we’re on the subject of birding by ear, I tested out three different bird sounds apps that let you record a bird song and figure out who’s singing it. There are three available for both iOS and Android. 

The first, which I was most excited about, is Song Sleuth and I guess my excitement is that it has a drawing by David Allen Sibley on the load-up page. Unfortunately, I could never get this one to work well for me. First off, I didn’t realize you have to change the state, so mine was set to Arizona and I was getting all these rare western bird sounds in eastern Pennsylvania, but even after I figured that out, I couldn’t get it to do even an easy identification. While the other two apps identified a “peek” of a Hairy Woodpecker, Song Sleuth came up with Black-capped Chickadee, Blue Jay, or Marsh Wren. If misidentified Ruby-crowned Kinglet as a Pine Siskin, Red Squirrel, or House Sparrow. So, clearly, this is either too sensitive or not sensitive enough, or I’m not skilled enough to set it up properly. I do like that it will pick put the sounds of squirrels and chipmunks which often get me perked up in the field. It also identities sounds of human activity, but again, when I recorded just me clearing my throat, human activity wasn’t the first sound that it ID’d. It gave me Great Horned Owl, Rock Pigeon, and then Human as choices. I really wanted to like this app, but I...I can’t recommend it. 

The next one I want to talk about is Merlin. I just said that at one point I had deleted this app because it was frustrating trying to ID a bird using their 20-questions style procedure. While great in concept for beginners, I found that the birds I wanted to ID’d were clearly not in any of Merlin’s listings. However, when I tried the song ID feature on Merlin, I was blown away! It is really good at identifying bird songs. The best thing is that you don’t have to stop the recording and analyze the song, it’s done on the fly (no pun intended there!). As Merlin identifies a bird, an image of the bird and its common name are put on your screen and if the bird sings again, it will highlight the image of the bird. Also when you close the recording, it adds the place, date, and time to the recording title as well as all the birds it picked up. I really liked how easy this was to use and I find myself pulling my phone out of my pocket to find out what was going on even when I’m walking the dog. I had to download a pack, but both the northeast bird pack and the US and Canada packs were free to download. 

I’m not sure how I feel about merlin not identifying non-bird sounds. On one hand, it’s really great at filtering out things like insects, rodents, and people, but on the other hand, I might be interested to know what some of those things are so I can learn to differentiate between them. I’m still not thrilled with the Merlin bird identifier, but Merlin is worth downloading just for the sound ID part. 

The last sound ID app I want to talk about is BirdNet. Birdnet is the parent app of Merlin in that they were developed separately by Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology and now features of BirdNet are being integrated into Merlin. So, while Merlin supports just over 450 bird songs, BirdNet recognizes over 980 different songs. Although BirdNet takes a little more work to manipulate than Merlin, it’s definitely easier to use than SongSleuth and you can easily isolate the sound you want to identify by sliding your finger over the sound recording. And even better, BirdNet gives a measure of certainty about the sound. For example, I got an “almost certain” on the Hairy Woodpecker that, I previously said that Song Sleuth called a Black-capped Chickadee. That tells me how much I can depend on that ID or if I need to look for better clues.. 

Before I move on to the next set of apps, I should talk a little bit about e-Bird because we need a basic understanding of how e-Bird works to understand how these apps with it. So, e-Bird was started in the early two thousands by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society. It is a database of birds - meaning that birders can report the birds they see -whether it’s a single ruby-throated hummingbird at your feeder, thousands of snow geese on a lake, or something very rare for your area. For each entry, the user adds the date, time, and location along with the bird or birds they saw and it enters it into the computerized database holds all these records and can re-arrange the data depending on what the user wants to see. So, for example, a researcher might be interested in seeing how many hummingbirds were at a certain location during a particular month for each of the past 5 years and e-Bird will give them that information. Birders might be interested in finding out what rare birds have been seen in their area recently and e-Bird will give them that information, and you might be interested in seeing a list of all the birds you’ve had at your feeders this year. E-bird will tell you that as well. So, all this information is being gathered every day and it’s also being used every day. It’s citizen-science at its finest!  

At first, e-Bird was available only for the western hemisphere, but in 2010, it went global. Today, you can find what birds have been seen near you today or anywhere in the world. If you want to see a particular species, you can also look to see where it’s been seen. Something I do with it is look at the “hotspots” that are near when I’m visiting. Hotspots are places where a lot of birds are seen and they’re all listed under one location so it’s easy to find a list of what you might see in, say, Zion National Park.

But, how do we know these records are accurate? I mean, don’t people cheat, you ask? Well, first there are a series of automatic filters that all submitted lists go through. Those filters flag anything unusual, including larger than normal numbers of a species that might be common, and certainly any new species that a user might add. These are all flagged for review. There is a network of e-Bird reviewers that are on the lookout for unusual sightings within an area. And I know I’ve gotten these, you may get an email that says hey, your sighting is out of the ordinary. Do you have a photo of it or other information that we can use to document the sighting? If you do, then you can load it into e-Bird and it will help to document this species in that place and time. But if not, you’re free to keep it on your list, but e-Bird going to take it off the official record, so we don’t get these outlier things. So if it’s something unusual, but not documented, they don’t keep it on the official record. So, you know, if I reported seeing a penguin in Tucson, I’d be pretty likely to get one of those emails, but as a birder, I wouldn’t want something on my list that I didn’t see anyway. So, like...who would ever believe me if I actually saw something good? Anyway, the important thing here is that overall the lists seem to be very accurate and constantly monitored for listings that are out of the ordinary. If you want to learn more about what e-Bird is and the major contributions to science that it’s made, I encourage you to read eBird: A citizen-based bird observation network in the biological sciences by Brian Sullivan et al. I’ll put a link in the description and on the Here Birdy Birdy Birdy Facebook page. 

A couple of apps I tried incorporate the data from e-Bird into their app which I found to be pretty slick. One of these is GoBird. Go Bird uses e-Bird to show you a list of birds sightings near you in the past few days. It tells you where the bird was seen and how long ago it was seen. It also has a rare tab that filters just the birds that are marked as rare. The last tab it has is a Hotspots tab and it shows you the e-Bird hotspots near you. I used this recently when I traveled a little north of Kutztown into Clinton county. On my way back I wanted to do some birding so I pulled out Go Bird and found 2 really good spots very near to me. I touched the hotspot marker and got a list of birds seen there. It’s really useful when you’re in unfamiliar territory because you don’t have to log into e-Bird. You just pull up this little app and boom you can go birding.

Birder’s Diary also uses e-Bird’s data to give you nearby notable sightings, but it adds directions to the spot which is really appreciated! On the other hand, I haven’t quite been able to figure out the rest of Birder’s Diary yet. It works by “outings” which require some set-up, including downloading of packs like on some of the earlier apps that I mentioned. I do notice that you can download butterflies and amphibians, so if you’re into more than birds, this might be something you can explore a little more. The website advertises a desktop version - free download, full 30-day demo, and no commitments all of which mean a subscription service to me. If there’s anyone out there who’s used Birder’s Diary and wants to give more insight, I would love to hear from you. 

The last category I want to review is field guide apps. These apps are developed to help identify birds by sight and in theory, reduce the need for carrying a book into the field. Let’s look at the Audubon app first. When you open Audubon, the home screen gives you two options. One to search for a bird, so you would use that if you’re pretty sure you know what it is and the second is Identify a bird. I randomly picked a bird from one of my lists the last few weeks and it was American Crow. So let’s see how well Audubon does with that. First, I pick my state and the month and before I add anything else, I get a listing of 320 possible birds for Pennsylvania in October, but I can also add more information to narrow down the choices. First is size, I can pick from sparrow, robin, crow, mallard, or heron-sized. Obviously, I’m going to pick crow here, so I’m down now to 139 possibilities. Then I can choose the color, um...black. 132 possibilities. Then it asks me what type: gull-like, hawk-like, upright perching water birds, owls, perching birds, long-legged waders, tree-clinging and so on. I’m going to pick perching birds because that’s the closest thing I can find. 21 possible matches. Now we’re getting somewhere! Now it wants to know its activity. Was it using direct flight, soaring, flapping or gliding, hovering, or a number of other types of movement. Hmmm… I’m going to choose swooping here. Oops! Now I have only 3 possibilities: Northern Shrike, Eastern Kingbird, or Scissor-tailed Flycatcher. No, No and nope! OK, I’m going to take off swooping and use something else. Ummmm… I guess direct flight, you know, as the crow flies. So now I’m back to 17 possible matches. Lastly is habitat, where did I see it? There are forests, savannahs, deserts, canyons, high mountains, and my favorite landfills and dumps! I guess the best here would be urban and suburban habitats. OK, now I’m down to 11 possible matches. In order, the app lists Blue Jay, American Crow, American Robin, Grey Catbird, Northern Mockingbird, but you see I’ve got American Crow in there. Common grackle and Fish Crow are also in there, but further down the list. Well, that wasn’t too bad. 

Let’s try the same thing with Merlin and see what happens. Remember we used Merlin as a song ID app and it worked really well. First, I’m asked where I saw the bird with the current location being one of the choices. I always like that because it’s picked up automatically and I can use it while driving. Just kidding, folks! Rule number 1: Don’t bird and drive! Then, when did I see it? Today is the default. I’m loving this, it’s anticipating my choices. Yay, AI! Next what size? Here I only have 4 bird sizes, not five like in Audubon, but there are in-between sizes that I can pick. I’ll pick the crow silhouette again. Color? Black. I’m not getting any information about the number of possible matches here, so on to what the bird was doing? Eating, swimming, one the ground, In trees, on a fence, or soaring or flying. My crow was flying. OK, now I’m getting a list of possibilities and it gives me… da da daaaa….American Crow! OK, that was awesome. American Crow was at the top of the list. Common Raven was next and Pileated woodpecker was third and with  Fish Crow as fourth.  
Well, you know that was almost too easy, so I tried again with a more difficult bird for this area...red-breasted nuthatch. With Merlin, red-breasted nuthatch came up fourth with Eastern Bluebird, Tufted Titmouse, and Belted Kingfisher above it on the list. I used all the same parameters on Audubon and came up with...nothing! No possibilities in Pennsylvania in October for red, white, and bluebirds, that cling to trees in urban and suburban habitats. I tried playing around with the settings, but I could no way make it come up with a red-breasted nuthatch.

It’s hard to decide which is the better of these two. I almost think if you have a lot of trouble identifying birds, you might want to download both and see which works better for you. Neither of them is bad, but I just think the AI on bird identification isn’t quite as good as it can be just yet. 

If you’re more confident in identifying birds or if you want to get better at it without answering 20 questions every time you see a bird, you probably want to get iBird. iBird is available for both iOS and Android through their respective stores. There are several versions, including a free one, called iBird lite which has IDs for 50 birds if you want to try it out. That’s available for both iOS and Android. However, if you’re going to use it for real, I’d suggest buying one of the heftier versions. iBird Yard + gives you 242 birds for just 3 bucks on iOS and 4 bucks on Android. This is a great option if you’re just beginning to watch birds.

For the more experienced birder, you probably already know that iBird Plus Guide for Birds gives you 940 species and is on sale for $14.99 right now, but it’s only for iOS users. Boo! But if you’re going to spend the 15 dollars, you can get iBird Pro which has more ways to search for birds and offers 944 species for the same price. This is available for both iOS and Android and is the one I use on my phone. So, a ccording to the iBird website:

...unlike all other birding apps, iBird offers both illustrations and photographs for every species. The beauty of drawings is that an illustrator can emphasize the important identification markings of the bird family, something photographs can’t do. Photographs, however, let you see how the species looks in real life, and so iBird contains multiple photos for each species of bird. Usually, the male, female, juvenile, and subspecies are included, assuming they are available and meaningful.

Unlike other apps, every species in iBird contains a detailed field marks layer. This important layer can be turned on or off to highlight the important identification characteristics of the bird. Furthermore, every illustration in iBird is a high-resolution composite HDR drawing of the species in its natural environment. This drawing can also be printed out and framed. Additionally, iBird contains more bird song and call vocalizations than any other app (over 4,000). Perhaps the most unique feature to iBird is its comprehensive birding search engine that can turn anyone into an expert birder. It comes with over 35 characteristics that can be searched (such as body color, location, bill shape, etc.). There is also a cool AI-based photo recognition feature -- iBird Photo Sleuth -- available as a low-cost in-app purchase. Sleuth can identify a bird from any photograph, even poor photos taken with your smartphone or tablet.


Wow! There are some features in there I didn’t even know I had! I’ve found that having both the drawing and photos is very useful in the field since the photos often show the bird in different plumages and light settings. You can also quickly get a map of its range, the sounds, notes on the body, bill, and flight for identification, as well as links to birds that are similar to it so you can rule out other species. Fun fact, while I was playing around with iBird, I learned that a group of acorn woodpeckers is called a “bushel.” 

Well, I could keep looking at bird apps all day, but there are birds to see and bird books to read, so I’m going to wrap it up here! I hope you enjoyed this episode of Here Birdy, Birdy, Birdy!

If you're thinking about starting your own podcast, check out Buzzsprout, that’s B-U-Z-Z-S-P-R-O-U-T, Buzzsprout. If you use the link in the show notes, you can get a $20 Amazon gift certificate for free when you sign up for a paid account plus, you'll support your favorite birding show!

Also, check us out at the Illbird Press website.  It's run by my friend in birding, David Jurkiewicz, a fantastic birder and photographer. Check out his website at illbirdpress.com - I-L-L-B-I-R-D-P-R-E-S-S.

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Well, that’s it for this episode! I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it. Until next time, stay birding and nerdy, my friends!