[HN Gopher] Can you understand bird? Test your recognition of ca...
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Can you understand bird? Test your recognition of calls and songs
Author : fortran77
Score : 61 points
Date : 2023-07-23 14:54 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| I love the merlin app by cornell, but some reason, while it can
| recognise some pretty exotic birds, It didn't recognise the
| common crow cawing right over my head.
|
| I know it has the recognition, because the other app (bird.net)
| recognised the sound as a crow, but it just didn't have it the
| region pack for my country.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| An article I wrote on my local birds, if you would like to
| read:
|
| https://ryzvonusef.substack.com/p/bird-watch?sd=pf
| egberts1 wrote:
| Merlin iOS app from Cornell University is an excellent free app
| that does proper identification of bird calls.
|
| Disclaimer: Not identified with Merlin nor Cornell University but
| a very happy enduser of bird call identifier.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/merlin-bird-id-by-cornell-lab/...
| jdjdjdhhd wrote:
| I really like the BirdNET Android app for identifying birds
| meristohm wrote:
| Only in the past few years did I realize that most of the bird
| sounds in my neighborhood were robins; they make a wide range of
| sounds.
| bmitc wrote:
| I have noticed that, too! I am still up and coming in my
| knowledge of identifying birds by sight and sound, for which
| the latter I use the Merlin app. There's been several times
| where I've been like "ooh, what's that new sound/bird?", only
| to find out it's one of the local (perhaps to my yard) robins.
| [deleted]
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/2uWDX
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20230723151843/https://www.nytime...
| wenderen wrote:
| Caution for folks learning about the Merlin app from this thread:
| it's good at identifying bird calls, especially in North America,
| where there's a lot of training data, but it's not conclusive and
| can sometimes lead you astray by misidentifying a common bird as
| something exotic, or getting confused by birds that mimic other
| species (like mockingbirds). Treat Merlin Sound ID's suggestions
| as just suggestions, and use multiple inputs to identify a bird -
| appearance, structure, plumage, time of year, time of day,
| behavior, habitat for example.
| gs17 wrote:
| BirdNET seems to handle mockingbirds pretty well in my
| experience. I've tried it a few times when I know what they're
| mimicking, and it popped up as a mockingbird.
| CoffeeOnWrite wrote:
| Would you say more about mockingbirds? Does Merlin tend to
| output mockingbird when it's really a bird that a mockingbird
| imitates, or output a non-mockingbird when it's actually a
| mockingbird imitating that non-mockingbird? (I found an
| amazing-sounding bird and downloaded Merlin on the spot to id
| it, and it output mockingbird, that's why I am especially
| curious. It was a dark night so I could not visually id at all)
| wenderen wrote:
| Merlin's pretty at good at identifying mockingbirds by sound
| alone but once in a while it outputs a bird that's not even
| expected in your area. It rarely makes the reverse error
| (identifying the call of a non-mockingbird as the call of a
| mockingbird) in my experience!
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| The Merlin app by Cornell Lab of Ornithology is fantastic for
| identifying bird sounds in real-time. Besides the machine-
| learning tech the overall app is a great experience, clearly made
| by talented developers who probably also love birds and dogfood
| the product. Every thing about it is tailored to quickly giving
| you all the information you need to look up what kinds of birds
| to expect in different areas at different times of year and
| quickly narrow down possible candidates.
| shironononon wrote:
| Also love Merlin app and my life since finding it. A few years
| ago I kept hearing a beautiful and haunting bird song on hikes
| but after asking other hikers nobody could tell me what bird it
| was!
|
| Enter Merlin app and it picked it up easily as a Swainson's
| Thrush so I am forever grateful to the technology.
| jonah wrote:
| The Swainson's Thrush has such a beautiful, haunting song.
| johndhi wrote:
| Merlin identified a Swainson's hawk for me recently - first
| I'd ever seen!
| siegecraft wrote:
| I've been a user of BirdNet (also from Cornell, but apparently
| a different group?), looking forward to checking out Merlin.
| With Birdnet you have to record a sound, pick out the specific
| portion of the audio and click identify.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Merlin is automatic and realtime. There does currently seem
| to be a bug with recordings. It will highlight the wrong bird
| in the set during playback even though it was correct when
| the live recording was made.
| bmitc wrote:
| Anybody use the BirdNet Analyzer?
| https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET-Analyzer
|
| I've tried setting it up with the birdnetlib package but had
| trouble getting it running with a model and pack that was for
| my region. The default model for birdnetlib is in Europe.
| jonah wrote:
| One could say BirdNet is the "pro" tool. Merlin uses much of
| the same sound database and AI but as you've seen - is
| automated - set it recording and it will mark every bird
| sound it can hear and identify.
|
| Another good one is SongSleuth[1] - recently recommended to
| me by Nathan Pieplow because it has a "pre-record" buffer so
| you can hit record as or immediately after you hear a bird
| and it captures a few seconds before that instead of having
| to run Merlin continuously waiting for the bird to call next.
|
| [1] http://www.songsleuth.com/
|
| [2] https://earbirding.com/blog/author
| partiallypro wrote:
| I hear that chickadee call all during the Spring/Summer, was
| surprised when it meant "danger."
| theSuda wrote:
| Being from rural India, I have heard birds make similar noises
| and have successfully avoided walking into a snake or two. So
| that was the easiest for me honestly.
| enricozb wrote:
| There's a cool repository of wildlife sounds here (including
| birds): https://xeno-canto.org/
| jonah wrote:
| Nathan Pieplow[1] wrote the recent The Peterson Field Guide to
| Bird Sounds series[2]. He delves deeply into the spectrograms of
| bird songs and calls and describes and names the different
| features thereof. He offers the basics the basics on his
| site3[3]. I got to hear him speak recently - pretty interesting
| stuff.
|
| [1] https://earbirding.com/blog/
|
| [2] http://earbirding.com/blog/book
|
| [3] https://earbirding.com/blog/specs
| dghughes wrote:
| I know enough when some birds are upset. Crows are usually the
| most vocal. I'll try the test later but it's funny how well we
| humans with practice know. Except pigeons they are stoic.
|
| My cat was sitting quietly one day and crows made noise and my
| cat uncharacteristically growled a deep growl. She know something
| was up.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| We sometimes get the unholy trinity of crows vs magpies vs
| parakeets. Cacophony doesn't even come close when they're
| proper riled up.
| retrac wrote:
| The angry/warning caw of a crow is sometimes called scolding, I
| think. It has a wide range of intensity. There were many
| American crows around my last house. The degree to which they
| cawed, and in particular started up a chorus, was proportional
| to the threat. On my normal routine, I would get a few caws,
| and then they'd settle. If I diverged from my routine and for
| example, walked off the path, or if I had others with me, it
| would get a bigger response. And when I let the dog out it was
| just a flood of angry cawing.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| You'd think that by now crows would have collectively learned
| that dogs are not really a threat
| e40 wrote:
| Crows are very stubborn in their suspicion. More than most
| birds. Jays and Oak Titmouses (that looks wrong) have
| definitely warmed to us at home, since we feed them and the
| Crows. The Crows won't trust us at all, even after years.
| morkalork wrote:
| I have a paregrene falcon that sometimes comes to hang out in a
| tree in my backyard, grackles and bluejays will follow it
| around making noise and harassing it. The sound is unmistakable
| once you've heard it a few times.
|
| Bluejays themselves are known for their mobbing behaviour
| towards predators.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Some related anecdotes about listening to birds and sensing
| the rhythms nature:
|
| Out my window while I work I watch blackbirds harass crows
| over a field where the blackbirds nest. They don't show up
| until later in the morning, and I can tell I've slept in way
| too late if I hear crows. I can tell the sun isn't up yet if
| I can still hear bullfrogs, and at night I know to grab a
| blanket when the crickets chirps slow down, or to close the
| windows when the cricket chirps are dense, because it's
| probably cooler inside than out and I can preserve the cool
| in the house if it's a hot night. The robins seem to come out
| looking for worms before a storm, because the worms likely
| sense the pressure change and surface before hand.
|
| I had a squirrel problem over the winter, and I progressively
| started spreading a few peanuts out over the snow in the
| field further and further from the house and where they had
| less access to retreat to cover, as the hawks would show up
| later in the day where their shadows would be cast further
| out from their prey on the ground. I got the squirrels
| venturning pretty far out into the field for a while. I never
| saw the hawks get one, but one day I stopped hearing the
| squirrel and seeing it around. Not sure it worked, but it
| seemed like the most fair solution.
|
| I'm consiering a bat house to keep the mosquitos down as
| well. If you have the peace and quiet and time to listen, you
| can really integrate with nature pretty well.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| What I don't see mentioned in the article is that most birds seem
| to live on a much faster timescale than humans. If you record and
| slow the song down, you can hear _far_ more nuance in it.
|
| BTW the Merlin app mentioned in the article is fantastic. Having
| it for birdwatching is like having a GPS map in the city,
| especially when paired with a good directional microphone. It
| only tries to identify a bird itself, though, without attempting
| to decode the type of the song.
| bmitc wrote:
| I recall seeing an article somewhere that claimed or alluded to
| that small animals do indeed see the world at different time
| scales.
| unhammer wrote:
| what mic do you use?
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