A birder's quest to see 10k species | Hacker News Reader

A birder's quest to see 10k species

outsideonline.com

101 pointselijahparker32 comments

I've been a casual birder for a couple years now. I've been hearing about the Merlin app for a while, but never installed it until this past week. It has profoundly changed my experience of looking for birds.

If you're unfamiliar with the app, you can start recording on your phone and it will tell you in real time which birds are singing nearby. I haven't used it for positive identifications, just for knowing which birds are nearby. I've had numerous experiences already where a species I had no idea about was nearby, then a few minutes of looking confirmed the species it had identified. If you're a birder and you haven't tried Merlin, I highly encourage you to give it a try. It has also opened my eyes to a few species that spend almost all their time in the canopy and in heavy brush, which are really hard to spot unless you know they're around, and make time to look for them in those areas.

Using the Merlin app has also led to interesting conversations with people about how ML models work. People assume there's a bank of recordings that the app is constantly comparing your live recording against, which I don't believe is the case. The "bird packs" you have to download do contain a bunch of sound files, but those are available so you can play songs for birds you're interested in. I don't believe the identification algorithm is actively using those recordings.

https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org

Merlin has altered my relationship to the natural world, even in my urban neighborhood. I'm much, much more "present" when I'm walking. Even when I'm not using the app, I'm always listening. When I go hiking, it's always with me (it works in airplane mode).

Merlin really is great. My wife and I refer to it as Shazam for birds.

I've been using BirdNet for a while. Is Merlin significantly better?

They're both run by Cornell Labs though BirdNET has a larger data training set. They both use the McCauley library, but BirdNET uses more data beyond that for training so it's actually better than Merlin for that. Merlin's got a lot more functionality than just audio ids, though.

I’ve been using BirdNET for a few years now. Looks like it is the same university that makes Merlin.

BirdNET has more data and more species but Merlin can work in real-time on your phone without internet.

I wonder if there is anything like this for snakes.

Don't they all just go sssssss?

With the exception of rattle snakes perhaps

"For some reason, nobody wanted to try our Snake attractor 3000"

A great story about an extremely impressive undertaking. For those wanting more about obsessive birding there's Mark Obmascik's non-fiction book "The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature and Fowl Obsession". [0] The book was made into a charming movie "The Big Year" in 2011 which starred Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson. [1][2]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Big-Year-Tale-Nature-Obsession/dp/145...

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1053810/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCBAP2wId5M&ab_channel=Rotte...

I've seen that movie. Very funny.

A different birder and artist has a great quest to draw ten thousand birds. Amazing artist too: https://www.drawingtenthousandbirds.com/

Just under nine thousand to go. It really is a life long quest.

I have seen about 180. Nothing to brag about but it has taken me about 10 years. I have not been obsessive about it but has been a leisure activity many weekends. I have done it around the area I have been, but not travelled further than maybe 2, max 3 hours for the point of it. It is a nice hobby, sharpens your senses and it is fulfilling to observe nature. Compare for example with Pokemon Go, I find it infinitely more rewarding to "hunt" something real.

I'm not an exclusive bird observer. I make observations of 'moving' organisms from mammals to invertebrates, recording my observations on iNaturalist [1], which is a pretty good way for me to track what I've seen.

[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&user_i...

I'm always surprised by the quality of insect pictures on inaturalist. What are you using? My focus has been on fungi and plants, but I try to scan what people are recording in my region just to keep up with what is around, where it is and what time of life it is. The turtles laying eggs around now are worth keeping an eye out for as an example.

I am currently using a Sony RX10M4 camera with a Nisi close-up lens attachment.

It is a 'point and shoot' model (no detachable lens), so the lens attachment helps to zoom in on small organisms. With some support, I can take handheld shots of insects about 5 mm in length.

At the moment, I still find mirrorless cameras by Canon, Sony, etc. a bit too expensive for my taste, so I compromised by getting the RX10M4, which is considered one of the best P&S cameras with a huge zoom range, which is good for shooting all kinds of wildlife, big and small.

It’s more healthy not to be so “obsessive” and just do it because it’s a fun way to get outdoors.

Though the obsessive ones get celebrated it seems like a kind of madness, I wonder if they even enjoy it.

I do like photographing birds. So I’ll often bring my camera.

Once and while you’ll see something different like a heron catching fish.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/acomjean/9661826854/in/photost...

But a lot of times it’s just different ducks. https://www.flickr.com/photos/acomjean/50990143647/in/photos...

Cool! Flickr actually has a group "Field Guide: Birds of the World" and it tags photos of birds with their species. Combined with Flickr's API this is a gold mine to retrieve freely licensed photos of birds by species. The majority when I looked were tagged "All rights reserved", but most common species have at least a handful with Creative Commons license.

https://www.flickr.com/groups/birdguide/

But on the other hand, our knowledge and classification of the natural world is built on the shoulders of the "obsessive"s.

Most areas of naturalism require digging deep and obsessing over minutiae to unearth new discoveries.

And there's a season just for that last category:

https://www.birdandmoon.com/comic/four-seasons-of-bird-watch...

> Compare for example with Pokemon Go, I find it infinitely more rewarding to "hunt" something real.

Ha, that’s exactly how I describe mushrooming. You might find it similarly satisfying, though if you plan on foraging for food I recommend taking a course on identification (most communities have a mycology club) and sticking to the basics.

I'm shocked that there are only about 10k species of birds. I had expected there to be more, for some reason.

It is actually quite a lot. For example, there are 6400 mammal species.

There's quite a few more birds than mammals, though mammals are not especially diverse, esp. with 60% of mammal diversity in bats and rodents. There's at least 50k identified mollusk species, 65k identified arachnids, and with insects things go nuts with ~900k. There's around 60k identified vertebrate species overall (fish, mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians, etc), the invertebrates ~1.3 million.

The diversity is pretty fascinating. About half of the 10k are songbirds, the largest group by far even though they’re believed to be the most recent to diverge. Many groups have ~200-300 species each, like owls or woodpeckers or parrots. Some that you wouldn’t expect have a bunch of species (150 cuckoos?! 114 kingfishers!) and then others barely have any (6 flamingos; 2 ostriches - tho they’re both very old)

Fishes are the real lab in vertebrate evolution

Given the increasing difficulty of finding/seeing new species, at some point it will become 10 or 100 times more costly in time/money to see each new bird.

We are told to be more ecological. Meanwhile what is the carbon footprint of that guy.

The correct solution to excessive carbon footprint is taxation, not shaming individuals.

I've worked with Peter.

Ages ago, archeologists would join their country's diplomatic service for the chance to be paid to travel and live in far corners and dig. Peter joined the Foreign Service to bird, for much the same reason. Not much of a carbon footprint to hop in a car and visit neighboring countries. It's what we all did, to see the sights. But Peter did it to see birds.

A very, very nice man. I worked with him for over a year before I was told his status in the birding community, and I didn't hear it from Peter - he didn't talk about birds in the office: hardly anyone that was not his close friend knew he was an obsessive.

But again, to your point. The government ferried us around the world and dropped us off in interesting places where we lived for generally, about 3 years and then moved on. He took advantage of that and I would imagine his footprint is about the same as anyone who takes a car to see the neighboring sights on a weekend.

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