Birds Hitting Windows in Philadelphia

Like in other cities, buildings in Philadelphia's Center City have reflective glass surfaces that fool birds so that birds die in window strikes. Two researchers that have been studying the problem estimate that about 1,000 birds die each year in their four-block study area on Market Street. Most of the victims are migratory songbirds such as Ovenbirds and White-throated Sparrows, but they also include American Woodcocks and Wild Turkeys. Possible solutions, like elsewhere, involve shutting lights off at night during periods of heavy migration and incorporating designs that make glass surfaces more visible to songbirds:

Films applied to the glass to make it visible are one idea. At Temple University, art students held a competition to come up with attractive and effective designs. The winning version resembled sheet music with the notes shaped like birds.

Another student cut translucent film into the shape of molecules for the chemistry building's windows.

A New York company, SurfaceCare, provided a film with small, almost imperceptible, black stripes for the Bear Country exhibit at the Philadelphia Zoo, which, like many other zoos, has a combination of glass enclosures and trees. The bird strikes stopped.

SurfaceCare owner Marc Sklar is looking at new technologies, including glass that has elements in the ultraviolet light spectrum, which humans can't see but birds can.

Christine Sheppard, a bird collision expert with the American Bird Conservancy, has been testing prototypes of bird-friendly glass at a bird-banding station near Pittsburgh. She said the results could be used to write guidelines for architects.

"Nobody wants to kill birds," she said. But, still, "nobody wants more rules and regulations." Her goal is to educate.

"There are lots of beautiful buildings that are very bird-friendly," she said. "You can be creative and do architecture that will win awards" and still not kill birds.

Recently, the national green building certification program - Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) - began a pilot program that gives buildings points for having bird-friendly windows.

"So-called green buildings . . . are never green to me, no matter what their LEED award, if they kill birds," Muhlenberg's Klem said.

Chicago and San Francisco require that new buildings and major renovations incorporate bird-safe elements.

Minnesota requires that all state buildings turn off lights during migration. Michigan's governor issues an annual proclamation declaring migration "safe passage" dates and asking that buildings remain unlit at night.

A year ago, Illinois Congressman Mike Quigley introduced national legislation, still pending, to mandate bird-friendly construction for federal buildings.

Green Standards to Incorporate Bird Safety

For a long time, green building standards, as codified by the LEED program, focused on a building's energy use, often to the exclusion of other environmental considerations. One significant problem is that LEED-certified buildings often have large expanses of glass to let in light and heat and reduce energy use. Those same energy-efficient windows attract birds, which crash into the windows when they mistake reflections for trees and sky. Thanks to the work of the American Bird Conservancy and the Bird-Safe Glass Foundation, LEED certification will soon include credits for reducing bird fatalities.

To earn the credit, buildings must comply with one facade requirement, one interior light requirement and one exterior light requirement and develop a monitoring program.

The facade requirement focuses on the creation of “visual noise” to help birds distinguish inviting sky from unwelcoming wall by the making glass less reflective and more textured and/or opaque.

The lighting requirements can be met through actions as simple as turning off all the interior lights in a building at night or making sure that exterior lights are not angled up into the sky.

This looks like a step in the right direction. A green building ought to be safe for wildlife, to the extent that this is possible.

An App to Identify Birdsong

I mentioned this already, but it really deserves its own post. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are developing an app to identify recorded snippets of birdsong:

Photo: Jeff Miller

For more than a year, Berres (and his graduate students, of course) have been testing and improving the fruit of that inspiration: WeBIRD, the Wisconsin Electronic Bird Identification Resource Database.

Like music-identification apps Shazam and MusicID, WeBIRD allows anyone with a smartphone and a mysterious bird nearby to record the bird’s call, submit it wirelessly to a server and (after a few seconds) receive a positive ID on the species of bird tweeting away within earshot.

“I am amazed at how good it is,” says Berres, who has also used WeBIRD to identify grasshopper species by their clicking calls and frogs by their croaks. “In fact, not only can WeBIRD tell you which species you’re hearing, it’s good enough to identify individual birds from their song.”

For birders, the former qualifies as a reason to rejoice. For researchers, the latter could change the nature of field studies. For the birds, WeBIRD — which hopes to make available to the public in time for the spring migration in 2012 — could be a lifesaver....

Accurate automated analysis of recorded songs could help researchers track the comings and goings of flocks and individuals. Instead of sending students and scientists out into the wild to collect data — collection that could be hindered by variations in hearing, fatigue, biting insects and the very presence of a human being — a research team could venture out periodically to collect recordings of research plots and analyze the results with WeBIRD.

To place a bird call with its species is a chore far more complicated than the music-matching apps....

“When a bird sings, the song itself may have varying amplitudes and frequencies,” Berres says. “It can also speed up a little bit, slow down a little bit. They may throw in a note here or take out a note there.”

Birds also differ their calls throughout the day. And a bird of a particular species on UW–Madison’s lakeside campus may develop an accent of sorts, distinct from birds of the same species living just a few miles away at the UW Arboretum.

The WeBIRD algorithm dices bird calls into time-ordered chunks of frequency and energy, using data-organization techniques more often applied by geneticists to jumbled bits of DNA geneticists to “align temporally misaligned data, working around a lot of the variation,” Berres said.

An app like this was bound to come along sooner or later, and however well it works, it is likely to change birding. If its use becomes widespread among birders, more birders will be able to identify birds by sound. Will this tool be accepted by the birding community? Will identifications by app count the same as identifications by ear or sight? Will the ABA adjust its listing guidelines in light of the new app? These things will all need to be worked out once the app becomes publicly available.

Birds of Haiti iPhone App to Benefit Disaster Relief

There is a new iPhone app for the Birds of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and its sales will benefit continuing disaster relief efforts in Haiti.

100% of the app sales will go immediately to relief efforts in Haiti led by Partners in Health and Habitat for Humanity. The funds will directly support on-the-ground efforts to provide medical care and critical supplies to those affected by the earthquake, as well as to long term strategies to rebuild stronger and more sustainable communities in Haiti.

Partners in Health and Habitat for Humanity were chosen because they have been doing humanitarian work in Haiti for several decades.

The app features 58 birds that are endemic on the island of Hispaniola. Some birds, like Yellow Warbler, will look familiar to North American birders but occur on the island as endemic subspecies. One, Bicknell's Thrush, is not endemic, but the island is its primary winter range. Most are Caribbean specialties, such as the Hispaniolan Crossbill pictured at left. The app reproduces text and illustrations from a recently-published field guide, Birds of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. In addition, there are audio samples for the songs and calls of each species.

 This is not a complete field guide for Haiti and the Dominican Republic since the omits species that the island shares with the rest of the West Indies or that occur as migrants. However, it provides an interesting look at the birds that live there.

The Secret Life of Puffins

Hawks have their nestcams, and now puffins do too. Two webcams are monitoring the progress of an Atlantic Puffin nest in the U.K., and the live feed is being streamed online.

Two cameras have been put around a puffin burrow at Sumburgh Head on Shetland, and images are being beamed to the nation via the RSPB website.

The puffincam is part of the wildlife charity’s ‘Date With Nature’ at Sumburgh Head, one of many UK-wide projects aimed at giving people up close and personal experiences with nature.

Newton Harper, Date with Nature Assistant, says: “We hope that by seeing these incredible images, people will feel even more passionate about Shetland’s seabirds, especially puffins, or ‘Tammy Nories’ as they are known in the islands.

“Sumburgh Head is one of the most accessible places in Shetland to see puffins and now with our puffincam people can also watch them from the comfort of their own home.

“Puffins are perhaps the nation’s favourite seabirds and I have heard that people are watching the camera from dawn to dusk.”

You can find the live feed on the RSPB website.

Reporting Sensitive Species

Today eBird issued some guidelines for submitting sensitive bird sightings to the website. The guidelines were published for bird species (such as owls) that are easily stressed by disturbance, but they could be applied to endangered that need protection or observations on private land that cannot handle an influx of visitors. This is going to be a more common concern as more applications are developed to take advantage of the various data feeds produced from submitted checklists. The guidelines offer four ways to contribute a sighting to the eBird database while protecting the individual birds.

• Wait to submit the sighting until the end of the season or after the bird has departed the location.
• Map the bird to the general area rather than the exact coordinates.
• Wait a week to keep the bird out of the Notable Birds data feed. 
• Hide the checklist after submitting it using the option available through "manage my observations."

 These all seem like good recommendations. I was surprised to learn about the option for hiding a checklist. I had not noticed that option before.

The BirdsEye-eBird Challenge

BirdsEye and eBird have announced the BirdsEye Challenge, with prizes for the birders who submit the most checklists between January 23 and January 31, 2010. The top three eBirders will receive free subscriptions to Birds of North America, Cornell's comprehensive reference guide to birds. The top twenty submitters will each receive a free version of BirdsEye, a bird-finding iPhone app that uses eBird's database to create lists and maps of birds that have been seen recently in your area.

Here are the rules:

1) Competition is for the total number of effort-based complete checklists from the United States and Canada submitted from 23-31 Jan 2010.

2) Number of species per checklist does not matter, so the eBirders living in the south don't have any real advantage (other than nicer weather, perhaps).

3) A complete checklist is defined as a checklist submitted that answers 'yes' to the question "are you reporting all species to the best of your ability"?.

4) An effort-based checklist is one using any of our four effort-based protocols: Traveling Count, Stationary Count, Random count, or Area Count.

5) Grand Prizes will go to the three people with the highest number of checklists submitted.

6) The BirdsEye prize will be awarded to the 20 registered individuals with the most checklists submitted.

7) Registration deadline is 31 January 2010.

Lots of eBird checklists from distinct locations are really helpful to eBird, its visualizations, and its utility for science. The more checklists we get, the better!

There is also a registration form if you plan to participate. Also, please note that an iPhone or iPod touch is necessary for using BirdsEye and is not included among the prizes.

As I wrote in my original post on BirdsEye, I was one of the app's beta testers throughout the fall. Since then I have done some paid work for them. I have already have a copy of the app, so I will not participate in this particular contest. However I would encourage any birders who have an iPhone or iPod touch to sign up. Both eBird and BirdsEye are already good projects and will get better the more people use them.

A recent update to BirdsEye added eBird data from personal locations as well as public hotspots. This should improve coverage in areas without many eBird hotspots (or eBird users) and make the checklists of recent sightings more complete. Sightings from personal locations are displayed on maps with a different icon (just a bird instead of a bird on a stickpin). They are mapped in the general area of a sighting rather than the exact location where a sighting was entered to avoid the problem of sending unwanted visitors onto private property. (In most cases of true rarities, the sighting will be announced on a state listserv or elsewhere on the internet if visitors are welcome.) You can see an example of this in the image at left.

Another feature that is new or that I simply had not noticed is that BirdsEye picks up data from Central and South America. This works only for the 847 North American species that are included in the app, so you will not find an Andean Condor or Marvelous Spatuletail this way. But if you want to find out where your favorite neotropical migrants are spending the winter, now there is a way using up-to-date observation data. At right is a map of Black-throated Blue Warbler sightings as of January 18th.

A Bird-finding App for iPhone and iPod Touch

Note: A week after I wrote this review, I was asked to join BirdsEye's staff on a temporary basis. I had no idea I would be joining BirdsEye at the time I wrote this, and I still stand by what I wrote here. However, if you would like to read an evaluation by an independent reviewer, there are now several other reviews published in print and digital media.

Yesterday BirdsEye, a new birding application, was released into the iTunes App Store. To date, mobile applications for birding have focused on the problem of bird identification in the field. Mobile apps have some advantages over traditional field guides as they can incorporate media such as audio, video, or extra photographs beyond what would fit on a printed page, all in a package much smaller than most books. A few apps already do this well. BirdsEye tries to solve a different problem: helping birders find out what birds are being seen nearby.

I had the opportunity to test BirdsEye while it was in beta, via a loaned iPod Touch, thanks to my friend Todd Koym, who is one of the app's developers. It was interesting to watch the application develop over the past few months, from its basic outlines to a fully-fledged app ready for release. While the content remained the same, the user interface improved dramatically. The descriptions and screenshots in this post are from the final beta, which should be substantially the same as the released version.

BirdsEye includes 847 species of North American birds. (The base version includes 470 species; additional modules are available for the other 377.) Each species has its own page, with a short text by Kenn Kaufman, photos from the VIREO database, audio files from the Macaulay Library of Sound, and a location map based on recent sightings reported to eBird. You can see a typical species page at left. Kaufman's text describes the habitat and range of each species, along with some behavioral notes, but generally avoids discussing field marks. This is intentional since BirdsEye is meant to complement field guides rather than replacing them.

Despite the lack of a physical description, BirdsEye can still be a valuable identification tool. High-quality (and sometimes spectacular) photos provide suitable visual aids if you know what to look for. More importantly, the audio files provide an impressive range of songs and calls that are clear and recognizable on even the iPod Touch's limited speaker.

The really exciting aspect is that finally we have a better way to harness the eBird database to find birds we want to see. From BirdsEye's homepage (see screenshot at top), a user can select a birding location. This could be a hometown or a destination on a road trip. Once a location is selected, one can view a list of birds that have been reported to eBird near that location during the past three years, with an option to view only the most recent ones. (I have the list of most recent sightings selected in the image at right.) Touching a bird species brings up the species page, which links to a map showing sightings within the past 30 days (via the bird on a stick pin button). On the home page, there is also an option to view nearby hotspots and what birds have been reported at them.

Finding the locations of target birds while on the road should work somewhat better with iPhone than the iPod Touch, as the iPhone does not need a wifi connection to download sightings from eBird. BirdsEye's species accounts, images, and audio will all work on the iPod Touch even without a wifi connection. However, the lists will not be fully up to date, and mapping will not work since hotspots are plotted using Google Maps.

Species maps show sightings at eBird hotspots. The map at left shows the recent Ivory Gull sightings in Cape May Harbor. Selecting a stick pin brings up the name of the site and how long ago the bird was seen there; touching the right arrow brings up more information about the hotspot.

For most uses this works very well, as eBird hotspots usually offer the best overall birding opportunities and provide the best sense of what birds are typical for an area. It also avoids the problem of exposing a truly private location, such as a residence or a restricted area. However, rare birds have a knack for showing up in places not on eBird's hotspot list. Those sightings will not appear on either the recent birds list or the species maps unless a hotspot editor approves a location for them before the bird departs. Finding rare birds with BirdsEye also depends on birders entering sightings at the most accurate locations, which is usually but not always the case. When rarities do show up at hotspots (and are mapped appropriately), a user can find out quickly where it is being seen and how to get there.

Despite those limitations, BirdsEye is an important step forward in connecting birders to the birds they want to see. Most birders will find this app very useful when planning birding outings. For beginning birders, it offers a guide to what birds are most probable in their areas. For more advanced birders, it can help with tracking down target species. Both can benefit from having a wealth of birding media condensed into such a small package.

A Personal eBird Milestone

Yesterday I reached a personal milestone in my eBird usage. One of the features that makes eBird such a compelling site is that the ability to set up personal birding locations and generate bar charts and other abundance graphics for them. If you have a local patch, this feature makes it possible to monitor how many species you have seen at the location and when individual species have arrived or departed in the past. It also provides some additional motivation for birding there. Each new checklist makes the chart more complete and adds better abundance data to make it more useful. As Nate wrote, the charts start to look like real abundance charts in a very short time.

Bar charts are divided into months, which in turn are divided into quarters that more or less correspond to the weeks. (The last "week" in each month usually has more than seven days, since it stretches from the 22nd to whatever day the month ends, whether that be the 28th, 29th, 30th, or 31st.) Each checklist either fills a new week or adds sightings to a week that already had data. The bar chart can pull checklists from as many years as you want; the default is 1900 to the current year.

After I did my usual bird walk in my local patch (Donaldson Park) yesterday, I entered a checklist and checked the bar chart for the location. That checklist had filled the last remaining gap on the bar chart for my local patch, so that now every week of the year is represented by at least one checklist. The top portion of the bar chart is below; click through for a screenshot of the full page and species list.

Over the past few years I have recorded 132 bird species in the park. The only species I have recorded for every week of the year is Canada Goose. I have seen other common species like Mallard, Ring-billed Gull, Herring Gull, Great Black-backed Gull, Mourning Dove, American Robin, European Starling, Song Sparrow, and House Sparrow during most weeks but missed them occasionally. There are also a few species like Killdeer that are present on almost a daily basis for most of the year but depart for a few months at a time. The list also includes a few relative rarities like Iceland Gull, American Pipit, and White-crowned Sparrow.

My bird walk yesterday included a mix of the regular birds and some migrants. The best bird was a White-crowned Sparrow at the east end of the park. It was only the second time I have seen on in that park, or in the county. There were also small flocks of Savannah Sparrows, Yellow-rumped Warblers, and Chipping Sparrows, in addition to a few Ruby-crowned Kinglets. In some ways the most impressive sight was a huge flock of Herring Gulls, a little under 800 strong by my estimate. Especially with such a beautiful afternoon, this walk turned into a great way to fill the last gap.

Unknown Observer Is a Very Proficient Birder

Source: The eBird Top 100

Hummingbirds at High Speed

An article on the uses of contemporary high-speed cameras had an interesting tidbit about hummingbirds:

The show, which averages 1.1 million viewers, is not meant to do original science. The team members do not do controlled, repeatable experiments. But they have made some observations that they think are original, which could always spur some real research.

In a segment about how a hummingbird feeds itself, Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Kearney saw something that they think helps the bird to remain balanced while moving at rapid speeds. Using X-ray fluoroscopy, they could see nectar inside the crop on the bird’s neck, sloshing back and forth, acting as a fluid damping system. It was “taking the vibrational energy out of the body system and not letting it transfer up to the head,” Mr. Lieberman said.

“It was very easy to see on video,” he said. “But without seeing inside the bird as it flies, you would never even think about it.”

Some Thoughts on Twitter and Birding

Over the past week, Gunnar Engblom posted two primers on how Twitter can be used by birders. I recommend both of them, especially for readers who are not familiar with microblogging. You can read them at his blog: An introduction and Twitter, hashtags and RSS feeds.

Twitter is a webapp that enables users to post short updates ("tweets") about where they are or what they are doing. Updates are limited to 140 characters but may include links to more information or hashtags to make related posts easier to find. For example, #birds links to a page listing recent tweets about birds. (Gunnar explains how to use hashtags in more detail.) A user can choose to follow other users and in turn can attract followers. At its best, it is a tool for users in disparate locations to participate in conversations about shared interests or current events.

Once per week Rare Bird Alerts (RBAs), while still useful, are usually "old news" by the time they hit the hotlines. Currently they act as a summary of the sightings posted on local email lists and reports from refuges that maintain sightings logs. Email lists have already replaced RBAs as a primary source for rare bird information. Meanwhile, eBird is challenging the primacy of email-based notifications with its rare bird gadget and rarity map.

So how does Twitter relate to RBAs? As with mailing lists, birders can tweet their rare bird sightings in time for other birders to visit the location and see the bird. One can even provide real-time updates (possibly with photos!) by posting via cell phone. Because of this, Twitter has real potential as a rare bird alert system, especially in areas with a significant number of birders who use the webapp. As Gunnar argues, birders in a state or region can mark their tweets with relevant hashtags (e.g., "#njbrd") to make it easier for others to track rare bird tweets.

However, Twitter is not able to replace email-based networks just yet. While Twitter activity has soared in the past few months, especially with the recent media boost, there are still relatively few people using it, both among the population generally and birders specifically. Even among social media enthusiasts, there are a lot more people on Facebook or MySpace. Twitter also must compete with an array of similar microblogging services like Identi.ca. There are some social networks that cater specifically to birders, the best of which is ChirpTracker (currently in invitation-only beta). So far, we do not have a good way to collate the activity streams coming from all these various services, which makes it difficult to rely on them for rare bird information.

That said, I think that Twitter is a great service and has a lot of potential for birders to communicate with each other. ChirpTracker may turn out to be more useful for rare bird posts, since it features built-in mapping functions and will make it easier to find other local users in the near future. I could see either or them, or perhaps a webapp yet to be unveiled, supplanting email lists once they build up a large enough user base.

If you are on Twitter, or join in the future, you can follow my tweets at twitter.com/dendroica. Find other birders via the Twitter birdwatchers' group. If you would like to try ChirpTracker, you can request an invitation at the website or by joining Twitter and sending a message to @chirptracker.

Sharing Checklists

EBird now allows checklist sharing, so that multiple users can submit sightings to the same checklist when they bird together.

Checklist sharing makes it possible to copy an eBird checklist to another user's account. Each user can edit the checklist to more closely match the species he or she saw that day. This allows multiple copies of the same checklist to be associated with a single birding event and ensures that we do not create unnecessary duplicates for our scientific analyses. At the same time, this gives our users the flexibility to make sure that their personal records are accurate. We are excited about this release for several reasons: 1) it will make data entry easier for eBirders that bird in groups; 2) it allow us to more accurately describe your group birding events; and 3) it provides an easy way to introduce people to eBird.

When birding as part of a group, we consider there to be two types of checklists: a Group Checklist and an Individual Checklist. A Group Checklist is the summation of the highest counts of each species seen by the group. Thus, if one person in the group sees 8 Painted Redstarts and 2 Red-faced Warblers, but the rest of the group saw 6 Painted Redstarts and 3 Red-faced Warblers, then the Group Checklist would show 8 Painted Redstarts and 3 Red-faced Warblers. When a shared eBird checklist is accepted by another member of the group, a unique Individual Checklist is created which can then be edited. In addition, a Group Checklist is automatically created that is a summary of reports by all members of the group, taking the highest value for each species from each checklist. Although each user's Individual Checklist will remain unique within his or her personal account, the Group Checklist that eBird uses for output (maps, graphs, bar charts) will be a combined checklist for all individuals.

The link has directions for how to do this.

About BirdPost

There have been a number of posts recently on other birding blogs about a new web service called BirdPost. It bills itself as a way for birders to keep track of their own sightings and find other people's sightings within a given area. It also provides social networking tools.

As a listkeeping application, it leaves a lot to be desired. It appears that sightings have to be added one by one via the web interface, with no checklist option. That means that if you see 50 species at a single location, each one needs to be entered individually. (A file upload option remedies some of those problems.) Sightings are also apparently not reviewed, meaning that the service's potential as a citizen science application is limited. It is also not clear whether one can keep any kind of list other than a lifelist (no year list? no state list?).

As a social networking application, it may have some potential. There does not seem to be much competition for social networking specifically geared towards birders. However, here too, Birdpost offers little more than the basic functions of creating profiles and "friends." It seems to lack many of the communication tools that make other social neworking sites so successful.

A word of warning: read the Terms of Service carefully before depending too much on Birdpost:

14. MODIFICATIONS TO SERVICE

BirdPost™ reserves the right at any time and from time to time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, the Service (or any part thereof) with or without notice. You agree that BirdPost™ shall not be liable to you or to any third party for any modification, suspension or discontinuance of the Service. BirdPost™ reserves the right to convert its service or website or any portion of its service or website to a fee-based or subscription model, at any time, and without prior notice. BirdPost™ reserves the right to amend its pricing structure, at any time and without prior notice, as it sees fit.

That should give some reason for caution, especially as the site's owners apparently want to move to a $50/year subscription once there are enough users. (The reference is to a video on Techcrunch, which I cannot watch at present as my speakers are not connected.) Language in the TOS is also unclear about the ownership of user-generated content, and what Birdpost might choose to do with it. (Sell it to advertisers?)

There are already two good internet listkeeping services: eBird and Birdstack. EBird provides birders with a simple portal to contribute their sightings for bird conservation via the Avian Knowledge Network and Global Biodiversity Information Facility. It is a true citizen science service, and its developers are constantly improving the site's listkeeping tools. Birdstack is a flexible listkeeping service with a worldwide scope. It allows users to define their own lists and share them with other users. It also provides gadgets for adding those lists to other websites, such as blogs. While Birdstack is not itself a citizen science application, data entered there can be exported into spreadsheets that one can upload to eBird, without further modification. Like Mike McDowell, I am not sure that Birdpost offers anything significantly better than those two services. My hope is that one of those services would eventually add the social media aspects of Birdpost, while maintaining their already-superior listkeeping applications.

Robo-Birding

Climate change and habitat loss are changing the distributions and population size of many bird species. Many species require urgent conservation actions. The trouble is, how do we know what species are in decline and where they are currently located? In North America, this need is met partly by volunteer projects like the Christmas Bird Count and Breeding Bird Survey. Even with large-scale projects such as these, however, areas with high (human) population density are going to be covered much more thoroughly than low-density areas. Other volunteer projects such as eBird suffer from the same problem.

Some German computer scientists are exploring a possible technical solution for covering the gaps: a recording device with software that can identify bird songs. Microphones would be left in the field for some period of time, and then the many hours of recordings would be analyzed by computer back at a laboratory.

In his project Daniel Wolff of the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Bonn initially concentrated on the bio-acoustic recognition of the Savi’s warbler and the chaffinch. He listened carefully to the various types of birdsong, scrutinised them in a spectrogram and transferred the characteristics to algorithms. As soon as specific parameters are met, the programme kicks in. ‘For example, the signal of the Savi’s warbler has a mean frequency of 4 kHz, which is very typical. If, in addition, individual elements of the signal are repeated at a frequency of 50 Hz, this is detected as the call of a Savi’s warbler,’ Daniel explains. The chaffinch detector also analyses periodic repetitions of elements like these. In doing so it reveals more of a typical verse structure than the pitch of the chaffinch’s song.

The Savi’s warbler detector, particularly, which was subjected to long-term monitoring at Brandenburg’s Parsteiner Weiher, is characterised by what researchers call ‘robust recognition’, i.e. a high degree of reliability. Despite interference from rain, wind and amphibians the programme recognised, with a 92% detection accuracy, the song of a species of bird which is still found on the shores of the Baltic but which has become rare elsewhere in Europe.

The birdsong detectors are as yet only calibrated for the birdsong of individual species. However, in the near future, Daniel Wulff thinks, it will be possible to link them up to a kind of superdetector which can recognise as many species as possible and, in combination with GPS coordinates, will make the mapping of bird populations simpler and more efficient.

If this works, it could provide an easier way to monitor areas that are not already covered by population surveys. It seems, though, that the project still has some ground to cover before it can do full population monitoring. In the meantime, keep birding and reporting your sightings!

Bulk Uploading for eBird

The bulk upload tools for eBird that were previously in beta are now officially released. You can read more about them here.

Stupid Spammer Tricks

As spam prevention has become more sophisticated, spammers have changed tactics to match. Among other tools, comment systems use filters that can separate legitimate comments from spam. One tactic against filtering seems to be copying the text of a previous comment and posting it along with a spam url.

Commenter "Dicky" did just this on my previous feeder bird post. "Dicky" copied two paragraphs from BG's comment, made a nonsensical statement, and then added the address of a spam site into the body of the comment and the url box. "Dicky's" IP address tracks to Indonesia; my guess is that this is an infected PC that was hacked remotely and turned into a spambot.

It seems that CAPTCHA and word verification are not completely safe either.

Adding Google Gadgets

Bird bloggers who use Blogger as their platform might be interested in this news. Blogger in Draft has announced the integration of Google Gadgets with Blogger blogs. Currently the feature is available only in draft; it will be promoted to all blogs sometime in the future. For more details, see the announcement.

The feature might be useful for bird bloggers, since it will be easier to add things like the eBird gadget (or other features that might become available).

eBird Data Import

About a month ago, eBird announced the release of a data import tool. Normally, contributors to eBird submit sightings through a checklist form with a web browser interface. The data import tool allows users to upload spreadsheet files (in csv format) instead. The advantage is that one can submit many records at once, instead of filling out one checklist at a time. It will help individuals (and organizations) that maintain their own datasets to share their sightings with other birders and scientists.

Data import is currently in beta-testing. If you would like to try it, contact eBird at the link above for directions. I signed up as a beta tester and found that the process works well. Proper formatting of the data does take some time. Spreadsheets need to have the columns and rows in a standard order for importation, and species names and other terminology need to be consistent. It helps if you provide coordinates for a location the first time it appears in the dataset. (Here is a site to find latitude and longitude.)

I like this tool because it provides an easier way to coordinate my records on Avisys and eBird. Some features are promised to make importation from birding software easier. I find that the process works fairly well for Avisys records as it is.

New Bird Video Website

Bird Cinema is a new Youtube-like service where users can upload, view, and comment on digital videos of birds. The site so far looks promising. Good bird videos have been posted on Youtube and other video sharing sites, but finding them among all the other videos can sometimes be difficult. This should make that aspect a little easier. Of course, the value of a service like this depends on how many people choose to participate. The sound and video appear to be a little out of sync on some videos, but for the most part the quality is good. Below is a video of a yellow-breasted chat.