A beginner’s guide to identifying birdsong | Hacker News Reader

A beginner’s guide to identifying birdsong

bbc.co.uk

62 pointspenguin_booze33 comments

Cheat and install Bird Net: https://birdnet.cornell.edu/ works amazingly well. And once you have the song identified once, you can recognise it again.

Thanks for that. Looking forward to trying it out. Do you – or anyone else – know of similarly useful apps for appreciating and/or learning more about nature?

Living in Ireland, I’ve found the BritishTrees app from the Woodland Trust to be useful for identifying trees and the Night Sky app for celestial objects.

Being restricted to a 2km/5km limit over the past couple of years gave me a much greater appreciation for the more subtle aspects of local flora and fauna. I can now recognise by sight many more bird species than I would have been able to 2 years ago.

I'd recommend taking a look at iNaturalist: https://www.inaturalist.org/home

When you post observations, their AI does a great (though not perfect) job of identifying species. Works really well for birds, butterflies, does a generally good job on plants (tip: if it's flowering get the flower in the photo), and also is good with many wild mammals if you can get a decent photo. Not so good for many beetles, fungi, moss and other species where a photo's not really adequate for id. You post observations with time and location they have a map you can explore in many ways, and also there's an 'Explore' option that lets you see what wildlife are being reported in your area or an area you choose to explore.

Also the data from those observations is used by scientific researchers, so by using it you're contributing to citizen science.

edit to add: also it's free

'Seek' by iNaturalist is really good. Point your phone camera at an animal or plant, and it'll try to ID it

I’ve been using anki flash cards to learn birds in my local area. It works really well, in a few weeks I could identify a few score different birds.

I’ve also used Anki to learn some plants and insects.

Also, if you Reddit, subscribe to r/whatisthisbird (along with whatisthisbug and r/birding), and every day you’ll learn birds and bugs. I also do this with artwork as my random desktop background. I see it every day, so I can now recognize some paintings. I put no effort into learning, they’re just there and I pick it up passively! Should work with pics of birds.

How do you use anki for birding? Do you study birdsong or are you learning visually?

was it a premade deck, or did you build it yourself? I've used Anki for school, would be interesting to try for wildlife.

I'm not sold on the plant ones. I saw a long thread on instagram of a botanist rubbishing on of the "recognise a plant via a photo" apps. I wish I could remember which one it was...

Bird Net has never let me down though (in Europe at least - not tried further afield).

One reason I like the BritishTrees app is that it doesn’t use or relay on photographs. You’re asked to choose from various characteristics of the tree and the more information you provide, the better the app can narrow down the list of possibilities.

eBird, iBird Pro (UK), BirdNet, Merlin, PlantNet, and iNaturalist are my go-to apps for general outdoors adventures and casual walks. I like snapping pictures and posting on iNaturalist because the community and citizen scientists will help you ID birds, reptiles, plants, flowers, insects, etc. iBird is great for bird ID from pictures and a library of sounds.

The pandemic also brought more awareness of my local flora and fauna for me as well.

I've found PictureThis to be great for identifying plants. They claim to cover 100+ countries. There's a premium version but I just opt out by hitting the Cancel button at top right of the screen. It's been able to ID plants from photos other people have taken (pointing at their phone).

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. Rather than reply to individual responses, I’ve upvoted them and look forward to trying out the suggestions.

On my walk this evening, I tried Bird Net and found it very intuitive to use. It successfully identified magpies (which I already recognised) and blackbirds (which I wasn’t sure about it).

Agreed. This is the single most useful tool to learn bird song.

A sister team from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology also has a app called "Merlin," which can automatically identify birds by picture or sound. BirdNET feels targeted towards folks doing bioacoustics research while Merlin is focused around education and outreach. Merlin's Sound ID is fairly accurate and it can identify (recorded or live) bird calls from your phone's microphone! https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/sound-id/

Lately I've been teaching myself bird calls from custom-built Anki flashcards (I can't see well, so learning to bird by sight is less interesting to me than birding by ear). Having an easy way of "checking my work" in the wild really helps me feel confident about learning the birds in my neighborhood.

That's a great idea - do you mind sharing your flashcard deck?

Great to see so much interest with birding these days - we've soft launched our MVP of 'Strava for Birdwatching'* UK/EU only atm, but people stateside can email me dom@birda.org for an invite

https://birda.org/

I'm in the upper Midwest and heard a pleasant owl "hooting" last night, but it was interspersed with just an awful squawk noise. My partner thought that other noise might be a juvenile owl, is that something others have heard of? I'll download that birdnet to see if they can confirm but it was just such a striking noise.

Maybe a screech owl? https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Eastern_Screech-Owl/soun...

Barred owl calls also can be a bit squawky/jarring: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Barred_Owl/sounds

I bet it was a barred owl from what I've been reading -- not exactly like anything on that sounds page but similar enough I think they're related.

Barred Owls can make a terrifying squawk/yell/howl noise! Juveniles will make the noises as well to call to their parents. I heard a family of 5 BAOW this past summer (also upper Midwest here) and got to observe them all communicating and the parents hunting around dusk. It was magical and I got to hear these owl calls in the wild.

I've definitely seen barred owls in the area, so I bet that was it. Thanks for the tip, magical is a great way to describe it. Actually turned off the TV / lights last night when we heard them calling and just sat in the dark and listened.

Nextdoor.com is great for this- the local wildlife threads on there are always so interesting. Turns out a lot of my neighbors are bird nerds and chances are yours might be hearing and maybe even have photos or webcam videos of the same owls.

There's a giant thread over a pair of Golden Eagles that nested in a tree behind our house and raised three chicks. I was feeding sparrows & nuthatches on my deck and it made me wonder if I was just setting up a nice little prey bait station for the eagles as I noticed them circling overhead one day while doing yoga.

Via my kid, I learned what a hummingbird call sounds like. It's a great experience to hear a call and be able to look around and find one. (I hear them quite frequently and they're pretty easy to spot).

Birds can't sing for shit. When's the last time a birdsong got stuck in your head?

Prairie Warbler, White Eyed Vireo and Wood Thrush songs stick in my head

Not stuck in my head the same as a song, but after a day birding I'll have things like Pacific-Slope Flycatcher or Red Crossbill calls stuck in my head.

The screaming pihah when I lioved in the Perivian rainforest for a while.

If you've never heard a wood thrush, you're missing out on something incredible. Its ethereal songs are so highly refined and wonderfully layered that they sound almost electronic. They are sublime. Of the wood thrush, America's favorite naturalist philosopher Henry Thoreau wrote, "This is the only bird whose note affects me like music. It lifts and exhilarates me. It is inspiring. It changes all hours to an eternal morning." Living in the woods, I'm fortunate to hear them often (though I almost never see one). Every time one sings nearby it stops me in my tracks.

There was I think a nightingale hanging around in a copse near me for a couple of weeks last autumn. It was so amazingly clear and liquid at 3am I didn't even mind being woken up.

That doesn't mean they can't sing. It means their songwriter's not that good.

We have a lot of California towhees in the ridge behind my house and they make a cute singular loud "Theet!" chirp that is distinctive and cheerful. For the first year of living here before I figured out what they were actually called, I just nicknamed them "The Theet Birds." They're fun to watch, they hop back and forth to dig up dirt for bugs with their feet and run all over the place making little trails through the bush.

We have housefinches and white crowned sparrows in my neighborhood, and both have really distinctive calls that get stuck in my head all the time. The housefinches sound like they're ripping a Van Halen riff, and the sparrows sound like they're singing the chorus to that TI/Young Dro song "Shoulder Lean".

All I know is something like a bird within her sang

All I know she sang a little while and then flew on

Tell me all that you know

I'll show you

Snow and rain

https://youtu.be/Xe2u7ogAgtQ

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