BASCOMB: These long days of summer are a fine time to get up with the sun and head out for some early morning birding. But if you don’t know a crow from a cardinal, not to worry. There’s an app for that. Bird Note’s Ariana Remmel has more.

https://www.birdnote.org/listen/shows/identify-bird-sounds-your-phone

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BirdNote®
Identify Bird Sounds on Your Phone

On a morning walk with her dog Aari near Denali National Park in Alaska, Denise heard an unfamiliar bird call. She asked the dog for an opinion –
Denise: [on recording] What do you make of that noise?
– but no luck there. She recorded the mysterious screech on her phone. Uploading the sound to BirdNET, an online tool, matched the call to a Northern Hawk Owl, a medium-sized owl that lives in northern boreal forests.

BirdNET’s creators, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Chemnitz [KEM-nits] University of Technology in Germany, trained the software on thousands of bird calls and songs. BirdNET uses artificial intelligence to make an educated guess at the bird calls in any recording.
And Cornell’s well-known Merlin Bird ID app now has sound ID, too. It’s as simple as opening the app, choosing “Sound ID,” and hitting record. It can pick out multiple species in the same recording.

These tools aren’t infallible. Some similar calls can confuse the apps, and they might not detect anything with too much background noise. Currently focused on species in North America and Europe, BirdNET is working on expanding to more regions. But already, it’s amazing to see what these AI tools can do.

BASCOMB: That’s Bird Note’s Ariana Remmel. For photos and more information about the birding apps, head on over to the Living on Earth website, loe.org.