Continuing the discussion from Sound tips and tricks?:
I am pretty ignorant of most bird calls. I certainly recognize the very common ones that I see/hear every day, I can even tell what they are “saying” (y’know what I mean), but I am absolutely tabula rasa when it comes to other birds.
There is an array of apps on my tablet that help me learn bird songs, and I own several media of various kinds (vinyl records, CDs, digital playlists) with recordings of bird calls and songs. Yet I am as dumb as I always was when it comes to birds which whom I do not habitually share the same auditory space.
Neverthess, I deleted eBird and Merlin from my (Android) phone – too big, too bulky, too much of jack-of-all-trades, too much for my needs. I am not interested in creating a bird watch list because I am not a birder; if I want to see what birds I have observed I will consult iNaturalist.
(Also I could not care less who in my vicinity saw what bird today/this week/whenever – this strikes me as such an American thing, what in Italian would be described as ‘americanata’, the kind of weird behaviour or trend that only Americans would find thrilling or desireable but leaves us non-Americans bewildered. Another example of ‘americanata’ is iNaturalist’s pandering to competitiveness – leaderboards, most observations, most species, most most most… how annoying. Projects by default show who the most prolific observer is , whereas I would like to be able to find and sort species in my projects, but again, they are presented by “most observed”. What is it with this obsession of always wanting to rank just about anything? But I digress).
I discovered BirdNET a couple of years ago when it was still a project of the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany. Now it’s partnering with Cornell:
https://birdnet.cornell.edu/
https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET-Analyzer?tab=readme-ov-file
I love it. The app is simple, straightforward, it records sounds as wav files (not just of birds, I use it for all sorts of sounds: crickets, syrphids, foxes, deer). Those sound files can be uploaded to iNat, and if you can hear the sound loud enough in the app, you will be able to also hear it that way on iNat. The app obviously only helps in identifying birds, other animals are disregarded, but that’s ok. If I want to record a sound I want to keep, I will use BirdNet. It also includes a spectrogram, and provides direct links to eBird/Merlin and Wikipedia for the species detected.
Recently I have discovered WhoBird. And for someone like me who is so bird-call-challenged it was a revelation!
As I refilled the bird feeder on my balcony today, the four species of birds that visit all the time (Parus major, Cyanistes caeruleus, Periparus ater and Erithacus rubecula) were all sitting in the tree across the yard anxious for me to get back in fast so they could come and eat in peace. As always, they were pretty vocal telling me to “get moving!” I launched WhoBird and was amazed – the app showed me the names of the birds whose calls it detected, optionally also showing me a picture, and it did so in real-time. No need to press any buttons first to send the sound file to some server for identification:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/YYML_-e3yls
This is the kind of help I need when out and about taking pictures, when I hear a call that I don’t recognize. A glance at the phone will do. It’s so much faster than even BirdNET, plus it shows me a picture of the bird so I can see it, too, and perhaps even photograph it.
Try it out. The app lives on Github and can be downloaded via F-Droid:
https://github.com/woheller69/whoBIRD