Gadgetory

they say birding is a hunt without blood and I'm on the hunt for this a great horned owl I got it in Northern California along with these American avocets I shot this video with the help of some seriously expensive photography equipment but apps running on ordinary phones are really helping to bring birding into the digital age all right so let's look at the white pin tool see if this looks like the female it's got the right shape beak right colors according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service there are 47 million birders that's short for bird watchers in the United States I'm one of them I'm not nearly as hardcore as some but I've been burning since I was a kid the biggest change has been an explosion of new apps in the past few years one app I like Merlin asks a few simple questions to help you ID your bird it's very easy it's like a five-step process you start start bird ID and then says okay where are you what time you saw the bird how big the bird was we'll say it was crow sized here what were its colors well that cormorant was pretty black so we'll go with black where was it it was in the trees and then it'll generate a list of possible Birds and there it is so there's the double-crested cormorant and if you want to test it you can play the calls it's really handy playing audio of bird calls is something no bird book can do that's a huge help for identifying birds you often can't see hiding in the bushes so here's the belted kingfishers and it's easier to download an app than to buy a bird book and remember to bring it with you I have bird books but I fairly quickly started using apps and I found one in particular the Audubon Birds app that I really like I don't carry a book anymore no thanks to the apps which apps do you use I have the Sibley in the National Geographic in the u.s. serious birders blocked every year to Ohio for what's called the biggest week in American burdened I went this year I came here for one reason a little bird called the Warbler each year in May thousands of these birds fly north on their migratory route to Canada but they stop right here at Magee marsh because they're freaked out about the idea of crossing over Lake Erie which is about a hundred yards behind me I only got a handful of decent Warbler photos but I did run into Noah Stricker he's a professional birder who set a record in 2015 so I ended up going to 41 different countries for 365 straight days and saw more than 6,000 species of birds how many species of birds are there there's about 10,500 recognized species in the world Stricker kept track of his sightings with eBird an app that taps into an online service used by thousands of birders do you keep track of the birds that you see and then you submit your sightings either through the website or through a phone app which is mostly how I use it now and that all goes into one big database you can also look at the data and see what birds have been seen in other places and by who and when while the tech may be changing this popular hobby Stricker fears a bit for the future the day that we invent a pair of binoculars that just automatically identifies a bird for you I think that's gonna be the end of birding as we know it just because it's too easy the throw the challenge of finding birds and identifying them after all instant gratification is not what birding is all about the fun is in the chase so until the apps take over I'm staying on the hunt you