
All about Birds - brudgers
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide
======
TSiege
I highly recommend their free birding app for iOS. It's a great intro into
brid identification and it's steps to finding a bird you just saw are simple
and user friendly.

It has standard packs that are for common birds in the continental US, but
also dozens of others for other regions all around the world that you can
download for free. I've used it in Hawaii, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, and
Portugal.

[https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/](https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/)

~~~
diggernet
I love Merlin!

My only complaint about it is that there isn't an equivalent app for spiders.
And insects. And reptiles. And mammals. And...

Ok, seriously, I do wish it had been keeping track of all the birds I've
identified with it. But other than that, it's pretty awesome.

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Xophmeister
What a weird coincidence. I currently live in the city, where there is a stark
absence of birds -- besides maybe coronavirus pigeons and gulls that will mug
you down a dark alley -- but I'm from and work in the countryside, where I've
established an acute awareness of the local bird life. I particularly like
listening to bird song; I find it very relaxing. As recently as last week, I
was thinking about compiling an Anki deck to help me learn to identify birds
by sight and by their song. However, I was discouraged not so much by the
quantity, but the subtleties in the differences (e.g., the aforementioned
pigeons vs. wood pigeons: one has black stripes on their wing tips, but I
don't remember which)... Seeing this, this morning on HN, re-encourages me to
pursue ornithology as a hobby :)

~~~
arexxbifs
Keep your eyes open and I think you'll find there are far more kinds of birds
in the city than one might first think. Once you get into the habit it can be
very rewarding!

~~~
ses4j
Cities tend to have a concentration effect on birds, especially during
migrations. Central Park in NYC, for instance, is one of the best places in
the world for birdwatching in spring and fall. Birds migrate at night, and at
first light, gravitate to the first tree they can find. Since NYC is concrete
for miles and miles, a very wide area's worth of birds all funnel into Central
Park (and other parks, of course) and you get amazing quantities and
varieties. The same is true for parks in other cities.

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losvedir
I'm starting to get into birding. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good
app to keep track of what birds you (and maybe others?) have seen? I'm
thinking both for journaling / logging purposes so you know what you've seen
before, and to know where good places to go are to see certain species.

~~~
ses4j
eBird. It is the defacto site worldwide for logging bird sightings. It is
free, the app is simple and powerful, and you are contributing to science
every time you use it. (It is a product of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and
they and other scientists around the world use the data heavily for many
purposes). Also, it has lots of tools that help you learn the birds (and
birders) in your area - localized histograms of sighting frequency, custom
lists of birds you haven't reported yet, lists of nearby hotspots...

As far as identifying, get a field guide (Petersen's, Sibley's are good in the
US). There are good forums with talented people helping if you submit pictures
on reddit.com/r/whatsthisbird or on Facebook "What's this Bird?" group.

~~~
mongol
Ebird may have larger reach than any other but species sightings databases are
usually mainly local / national. There are more records stored in these local
databases than in Ebird. So I would answer, "it depends where you live".

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mothsonasloth
Is this for America only?

I tried entering some species from the UK (Scotland), like the Corncrake,
Lapwing and Turnstone but nothing was found.

[https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-
guides/b...](https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-
a-z/corncrake/)

[https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-
guides/b...](https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-
a-z/lapwing/)

[https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-
guides/b...](https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-
a-z/oystercatcher/)

~~~
modernerd
Yes. From the subtitle:

ID help and life history info for 600+ North American species

~~~
anvandare
But the European Starling is listed.[1] And we have Eugene Schieffelin to
thank for that.[2]

[1]
[https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/european_starling](https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/european_starling)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Schieffelin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Schieffelin)

~~~
fmajid
I've seen European Starlings in San Francisco. Birds care not one whit about
human borders.

~~~
milgrim
The birds cared, at least about the ocean. But Eugene didn’t.

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neurobashing
Counterpoint: it’s what THEY want you to think. Teach the controversy!
[https://birdsarentreal.com/](https://birdsarentreal.com/)

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rc-1140
I've been dabbling in amateur birdwatching for a few years now, it's honestly
a lot of fun to be able to pick out local birds that I previously wouldn't
have been able to put a name to: recently discovered that there are Grey
Catbirds[0] in my area.

I wish Cornell's Ornithology lab exposed some kind of simple GET-only API,
would love to be able to integrate it into some kind of chatbot to get people
around me interested in the birds around them.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfWx6W7B1V0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfWx6W7B1V0)

~~~
ses4j
They do have an API. It doesn't have everything but does cover a lot of
interesting use-cases.

[https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/664302/S1ENwy59?versi...](https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/664302/S1ENwy59?version=latest)

You can also request to download all or filtered subsets of their entire
database and play with it locally.

Among other things, I built this
([http://empid.herokuapp.com/](http://empid.herokuapp.com/), source code at
[https://github.com/ses4j/empid](https://github.com/ses4j/empid)) using eBird
data.

~~~
rc-1140
I can't really tell if this is what I'm looking for. I was hoping for
something that simply cataloged information about birds like the Audubon does,
i.e., I can go to the page for the Purple Sandpiper[0] and see information
about that bird and hear its calls.

Regardless, I took a look at your project. It's very cool!

[0] [https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/purple-
sandpiper](https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/purple-sandpiper)

------
silvergull
Their app, Merlin, is awesome as well. I travel a lot and it has helped me
identify birds everywhere I go.

~~~
tpoindex
I'll also recommend another Android app, BirdNET [1]. This app does audio
identification. and is jointly developed by a small team of EU researchers and
Cornell. Covers 1,000+ species in North America and Europe. I've found that it
does a remarkable job of identification even with crappy mobile phone
microphones, and even in noisy environments. It ships off a recording to a
server for analysis using neural nets trained on 2.5 million samples. I'm
assuming that it's using Cornell's audio recordings, perhaps others. Times
when I don't get a good match, it's best guess is often correct for birds that
I know.

I've seen similar apps for iOS, but haven't tried any of them.

1\.
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.tu_chemnitz...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.tu_chemnitz.mi.kahst.birdnet)

------
abnry
If you haven't taken up bird watching as a hobby, you should absolutely do it.

You know that feeling of playing runescape or minecraft or some other game and
finding that one rare item? Birding is like that, except in real life.

I have audibly gasped many times when I've found a bird that I had never seen
before.

Get a decent pair of binoculars (nikon aculon $70 is a good cheap starter
pair) and take a relaxing stroll. Birds tend to like water and the edges of
two habitats (fields and woods, marsh and fields, etc).

Part of the fun is using your ears and trying to track that darn bird down.

~~~
elcapitan
For me one interesting aspect was to watch my "hunter sense" wake up doing it
- you start out and barely notice anything at all, you walk the woods and try
to see some birds, but then with time it "wakes up", and even though you're
not trying, you subconsciously "know" where some birds are, or that they are
there. And as opposed to actual hunting everybody is still alive in the end,
so win-win ;) (unless you're watching birds of prey of course)

------
japhyr
What's everyone's favorite bird sighting?

I'm from southeast Alaska. We have a lot of interesting birds, but they tend
to be fairly drab at this latitude. My favorite sighting happened on an early
morning run in southwest Colorado. I was running down a mountain road at
sunrise, and a western tanager was singing loudly from the very top of a tall
pine. It was the most brilliant, beautiful bird I'd ever seen.

~~~
fallinghawks
I've been into raptors for 25+ years, and at age 54 saw my first California
condor. We were driving back from the North Rim and I saw this massive bird,
then caught sight of the white underwing. Pulled the car over, into a couple
small shrubs (I was excited, ok) and grabbed my camera. I didn't have my good
binos (vintage Leica) but the camera had decent zoom. It was blasting wind and
the condor was riding it like a roller coaster, sometimes straight over me,
then seconds later a half mile north, then back, high, low. In the zoo, they
just sit; here, it was in its element and full of life.

------
poutrathor
Ah Wingspan[0] database as a service.

[0][https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/266192/wingspan](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/266192/wingspan)

~~~
irrational
Wingspan was the first thing I thought of too ;-) I should be getting the
Europe expansion any day now.

------
DanCarvajal
The Cornell Ornithology Lab produces some incredible resources for citizen
science work, keeps me I'm a happy donor.

------
hugoromano
You have to love the donate button for Cornell University, with tuitions of
50,953 USD.

~~~
WilTimSon
I'd presume the donation goes toward the Ornithology department specifically,
which probably isn't the best-funded in the university. It's not like they
expect you to send in hundreds, just a buck here and there to encourage them
to keep working on the database.

~~~
jason_slack
You are correct, it goes to the lab directly.

