By Chris Cullander
BPWA board member Chris Collander
We were recently awakened by loud “hoo-hoos” outside our bedroom window, and while it was clear that this was an owl, we couldn’t figure out where it was, and weren’t sure what kind of owl it was either (though it was so loud that my wife had to go sleep in another room).
It’s actually not easy to localize a sound. While there are good sound-level meter apps (e.g., Decibel X for iOS), you would need two iPhones several feet apart to get a good idea of where the sound was coming from. I had better luck with trying to identify birds by their calls.
BirdNET (birdnet.cornell.edu) is a free app for both Android and iOS devices that lets you record bird sounds and then upload them to find out what bird is making the sound. It’s a citizen science platform developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Chemnitz University of Technology to research whether computers can learn to recognize birds from the calls they make.
Out on the paths, I can often hear a bird but can’t see it clearly (or get close enough to do so), and this app has been fun to use to figure out who is calling (except for crows, for obvious reasons…).
To identify birds by their appearance, Cornell also offers Merlin Bird ID by Cornell Lab (merlin.allaboutbirds.org), which is also free and has Android and iOS versions. You can use a photo or answer three questions to generate a list of possible matches.
How about plants? There’s an app for that as well (actually, several). One very good one is Pl@ntNet (plantnet.org/en/). It’s a citizen science project that (in addition to North America) covers French Polynesia, Reunion & Mauritius and the Comoro Islands, should you be traveling there (though the coverage might be in French).
There are also free apps to identify animals (such as iNaturalist, from the California Academy of Sciences), animal sounds, animal tracks, clouds, and so on — but keep in mind that part of the fun of being out on the paths is NOT looking at your mobile all the time.
And in case you were wondering, the bird outside our window was a great horned owl.
(Feature photo of great horned owl by Mary Rumple, Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library.)