Identify Birds by Their Chirp | Hacker News Reader

Identify Birds by Their Chirp

merlin.allaboutbirds.org

93 pointsGroup_B28 comments

Merlin is an extremely radical development -- the biggest since I started birding 35 years ago! It is a huge change to be able to get quick IDs on calls and songs, unless you are already very expert on the bird vocalisations in an area. From what I've seen so far, it works very well in North America (tested on Eastern deciduous forest birds), and well but not quite as well in Portugal. It will be a good excuse/motivation to do some birding in other countries (e.g. South America) when the models are trained well on those species: the fact that individual locations in the tropics have larger species lists (making ID harder in general) and that vocalisations are a large part of tropical forest birding make it pretty exciting to have it working there. And I'm also looking forward to the app evolving a bit, e.g. confidence scores, labeled sonograms, etc.

I’ve been using Cornell’s BirdNET in Portugal and it’s proven very accurate, even when it’s a euphonic riot of overlapping song - I use inaturalist for photo identification of everything and anything. I’d love it if inaturalist brought in BirdNET or similar - afaik their sound identification is currently driven by humans.

Hi! OK that's good to hear. In Portugal it came up with false positive detections of Hawfinch and Little Owl. Both those species were present in the area (saw them!), but if you think about Hawfinch in particular, it has such a nondescript vocalisation (a quiet, short monosyllable) that it is really easy to imagine that it could be spuriously identified by the neural network (after being allowed as an ID by a prior/filter based on the species plausible in that geographic area at that time of year). I don't mean to sound like I know about the details of their neural net and classification algorithms, or like I know how to do better, but I do suspect that it will improve with some tuning to essentially make it demand stronger evidence for a call like Hawfinch. Little Owl is a bit more distinctive, but I don't really think one was calling when it said it was. I think it also spuriously identified Blue Rock Thrush, but maybe it was right and we just failed to hear/see one! The habitat seemed right. I haven't seen as many misidentifications in Eastern US (a couple of days ago I did think it said Kentucky Warbler for an Ovenbird).

I've had the same issue with little owl in Portugal (just yesterday). I believe it had to do with missing songs and cicada interference in my case.

For photo identification of plants, I've found Plant@net to be amazing (in Portugal)

Haven't played with this one yet, but I have messed around with the BirdNET app from Cornell. It's very accurate as long as the neighbors don't have their landscapers mowing the lawn and using leaf blowers right next door.

https://birdnet.cornell.edu/

it's very similar. they built this directly into the Merlin app. other diff is birdnet coudlnt detect birds in realtime where as Merlin can.

I just stood up a BirdNet-Pi[1] instance underneath my deck[2] and it's a super fun project. I designed a 3d printable enclosure[3] to mount an rpi in a bird-hut looking thing to try and keep the water off the device. I'm currently using a 4-mic array on a Seeed Respeaker hat which is notionally designed for far-field 360 pickup to be used on voice response devices (alexa et al). It works but it's not great, so next stunt is to try and build some more suitable microphone solutions[4].

It really is an interesting use of TensorFlow at the edge and the somewhat accidental side effect is that I'm learning the birdsongs of all the neighborhood birds which is an extra delight when I'm out and hearing their calls in the broader world.

[1] https://birdnetpi.com/ [2] https://i.imgur.com/xxugaVN.jpg [3] https://i.imgur.com/ycLVD6u.png [4] https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi/discussions/39

Nice setup and thanks for the info. I’ve been looking at doing a similar setup myself. I have an outdoor network switch in the same place under my deck. I bet I could stick a Pi close by and power it with PoE.

I've recently come across the haikubox[0] which uses the BirdNET dataset and optionally contributes data back to Cornell.

This is a neat little device perfect for gifts for folks who enjoy birds, but are not technical enough to run a BirdNet Pi or similar. My parents have theirs setup to ping them when certain bird species show up in the yard.

Fun project ran by passionate folks I can't recommend enough.

[0] http://haikubox.com

Identify the birds you see or hear with Merlin Bird ID - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31361300 - May 2022 (2 comments)

All about Birds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22289706 - Feb 2020 (49 comments)