Skip to main content

Bird Song

Wasted no time downloading Merlin Bird ID as soon as I read this article and can't wait to try it. Some mornings, the incessant chirping of birds in the yard don't let me snooze. As much as I love they are out there and being noisy, I wish they would start a bit later. Now, I might learn what birds are out there and if we installed a bird feeder that would prove helpful. I find myself using the Seek app all the time when we go hiking and over time, I have learned to recognize some plants and trees I did not know by name before. 

To me this is a lot like know your neighbors and community - it is isolating when you don't know who is out there. I like that I now know what weeds and wildflowers are growing in my yard and that I can recognize them in the wild as well, understand if the flowering bush in my yard is unhealthier than its peers around the neighborhood. It will be fun to know the names of the birds we often see on our hikes - thanks to the wisdom of the crowds that went into building this.

Merlin Bird ID is more than just a sound identification app, though; it’s the result of tens of thousands of bird watchers and citizen scientists submitting over a million avian audio recordings to Cornell’s Macaulay Library through the eBird app in just the past few years. Given the volume of data, Weber and Macaulay Library research engineer Grant Van Horn, plus other members of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, wondered last summer what it might take to create a birdsong identifying feature of the Merlin Bird ID app
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more