Have you ever been working away in a garden, digging over the borders, and heard a bird singing away that is unfamiliar to you and you wanted to identify what bird it was? Of course, if you get a visual on the bird it’s relatively easy to pick up a pocket book on garden birds and flick through the pages until you find something which resembles what you’ve seen.
What if you can hear the blighter but cannot actually see it?
Well, now there’s an app for that.
Isoperla have launched an iPhone app which listens to the bird song and using a recognition software, cleverly identifies the bird to which the song belongs. Bird Song Id helps you identify birds by their songs and calls, and lets you make your own recordings too. It is available in smartphone and tablet formats. An audiovisual library of 133 species is included.
It’s still early days so the automatic recognition is only available for 38 bird species.
Manual Identification is available for all of the other species. The user listens to a bird singing and answers a few simple questions about what they are hearing, the app then scores each species and presents a sorted list to help determine which bird it is. Isoperla worked alongside wildlife content specialists Sunbird and Jonathan Rougier of the mathematics department of Bristol University, to create the app.
Bird Song Id is available for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. It is an evolving product, and you get free upgrades.
The app can be found on the Apple App Store: Click here
After starting my garden maintenance and landscaping business in 1984 and running it for 21 years I decided I needed a change of direction (probably a mid life crisis, no seriously! :-0) Together with my family, wife Donna, Son Henry and Daughter Fleur (not forgetting Hector the Black Labrador) I moved to France in search of an old farmhouse to renovate. In the interim period whilst waiting for the contract to go through I started writing a blog. Initially just to keep a diary for family and friends to keep up with our progress if they wished but then it occurred to me that there isn’t a real time watcher of the landscape industry in the UK. I didn’t want to waste my experience and experiences so I decided I could put all of this Juice to good use so I started Landscape Juice.
Source: Landscape Juice – Identify Garden Birds by the Songs they Sing – Phillip Voice
