checking whether coordinates fall inside a national park is an exercise in computational geometry, surveying (the earth is not flat, what are coordinates on a sphere), databases, access to government data.

detecting birds is an exercise in gathering properly labeled training sets, neural networks and their topologies, matrix multiplication performance and/or orchestration of rented GPUs.

both of which cover interesting tasks, worthy things to learn, and are by no means easy.

"easy" is the bird recognition where you do an API call to a totem pole of third party services.

Except all the stuff millions of software engineers work on for billions of hours per year.