Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds | Hacker News Reader

Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds

academy.allaboutbirds.org

99 pointsyareally32 comments

The visual map that expands to short descriptions with the sounds, gives me nostalgic memories for Microsoft Encarta.

Is there anything as fun and interactive that is available today that could be used by kids? Wikipedia is great for adults but it’s just too much information and it’s not packaged in short and visual focus of Microsoft Encarta of the old times. The other cool thing of MS Encarta is it wasn’t too big, it was finite, you could exhaust one topic and then go explore something else, it wasn’t infinite rabbit hole.

> gives me nostalgic memories for Microsoft Encarta

Those were the days !

A bit like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? which used to ship with a physical almanac alongside the game disks.

now i have the lyrics to the theme song from the TV show in my head

given the right group and timing that rockapella would totally play at karaoke

lol, I actually sang it (or tried to) to open my college commencement speech :-) Brutal for one sober person, probably more fun for a group of non-sober people :-D

Microsoft had a lot of CD sets back in the day when there was bit of wonder that you could have all this stuff on your local computer. There was a lot of things related to music, maybe natural history, etc.

In case it isn't clear, the wall here is a representation of the actual wall at the Visitor Center at the Cornell Lab Of Ornithology. They also have a live webcam of their bird feeder, that is literally just around the corner from this wall:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x10vL6_47Dw

It's a really pretty place to visit, with 5 miles of hiking trails around it. If you get a chance to visit Ithaca, it's worth taking the time to visit:

https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/

Because it isn't clear:

There's one bird on this mural from each of the 243 taxonomic families. That's why there are a lot of unfamiliar species: because taxonomic categories are usually very unbalanced, with a lot which contain only a handful of species, and a few which contain the majority.

The birds on the mural are life-size. The ostrich is about 7.5 feet / 2.3m tall.

One question I have: what's the map projection?

If you haven't tried it their Merlin app is pretty fantastic.

I've used Merlin for a while and I'm still impressed by Merlin's sound identification, it continues to inspire me.

I wrote about it last year: https://digitalseams.com/blog/what-birdsong-and-backends-can...

The sound and visual recognition around a lot of things is pretty impressive and I imagine it will work its way into less obstrusive AR in a lot of ways over time.

Wow. I just tried it and it worked like magic. Thanks for mentioning that.

It's Pokemon for old people, I love it and use it at least once a day. Personal best for a dog walk - 23 different birds, personal best for sitting in the garden drinking my morning coffee - 17 birds.

My family got a little tired of me using it on holiday in Portugal, but in my defence there were a lot of new birds I needed to add to my collection.

Nice! I haven't tried Merlin, but I been meaning to set it up in the yard.

I've been using Seek on my phone, which is part of inatural. Similar thing, but pictures and most life, not just birds. That is totally Pokemon for non-pokemon peeps.. gotta bust out my phone every time I find something I haven't 'caught' yet.

Highly highly recommend. I use it at least once a week and have done so for several years. My daughter loves scrolling through all the local birds and playing the sounds they make.

And their eBird app! A masterpiece of design for a user base that they deeply understand. Something of a learning curve, but extremely efficient and useful for advanced / expert users.

Does it make sense that Merlin and eBird are separate apps? This confuses me.

Yeah - for sure I found it a bit strange... I guess the use cases (and maybe target users) are different:

Merlin - Use lots of data, storage, and analysis to help me identify what bird this is eBird - I can personally identify lots and lots of birds: keep track of all the ones that I and other have seen with maximum speed and efficiency

How is Cornell’s ornithology lab so strong? They also produce Merlin Bird ID (https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/) and work on the underlying BirdNET (https://birdnet.cornell.edu/).

“all about birds” indeed!

One of the coolest things I've seen. I'd recommend the "Behind the scenes" video in the page.

Am I wrong... no eagle?

There's one bird per taxonomic family. Eagles, Hawks, and Kites are all in a single family, so there's just one: a Black-and-white Hawk-eagle, in Mexico.

It’s funny how they don’t include the most populous bird, the chicken. The cognitive dissonance is probably too strong.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology studies wild birds.

Well, yes, although the ag school at Cornell has plenty of domesticated animals on campus.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology hasn't been to the island of Kauai

There are plenty of semi-wild and semi-domesticated chickens in the Caribbean and Florida. I still want to eat the rooster who woke me up from a great dream at 3am.

The description of Gallus Gallus ("Red Junglefowl" but also described as the "original chicken") mentions it being an introduced species in Hawaii (but also that it's interbred with "feral and domestic chickens" so it's hard to identify specifically.)

I don’t understand this comment. Are you implying omitting the chicken is some sort of conspiracy?

birds arent real

Could you expand on what the dissonance is?

Neat concept but looks vibecoded/authored by someone who does not know web programming. Many HTML and JS errors. Code is a mess. jQuery, angular, document.write, modernizr. Why?

Could be done at 5% of codebase size, with cleaner code, no var, better error handling ($http calls use .success(...), no zero .error()/.catch() handlers).

Neat comment but looks prompted/authored by someone who does not know Bird Law

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