ABA Blog

The evolution of county listing

I came to county listing quite innocently, at least in my mind. After college, I spent my summers doing surveys for the now published 2nd Breeding Bird Atlas in Pennsylvania, honing my earbirding skills so I could identify any breeding species by hearing just a snippet of their song. (Hint: If you really want to learn your bird songs, spend a couple summers out in the field, seven days a week practicing...) This job took me all over my state and to many areas I had never visited before. I was a very casual birder until college because I just didn’t realize that there was something besides casual birding. Remember, this was before Facebook.

An old Google Docs worksheet for my Pennsylvania County ticks (note I only had 2883 county ticks before uploading my point counts for the PA Breeding Bird Atlas)

I initially used an Excel spreadsheet (and then Google Docs) for a long time, but this was tedious and it made it hard to target species that would add to my county lists. I always toyed with buying Avisys, but just never took the plunge. Most of these sightings went into eBird as well, but my personally calculated county ticks number and what eBird told me I had were very different numbers. At some point, the eBird upload process became easy enough that I converted the 2,500 point count surveys I did across Pennsylvania into the appropriate format and uploaded them to my account, instantly adding several thousand county ticks to my eBird account. At that point I was really hooked and since then I have used eBird as my official lists keeper.

With all of my records on eBird, I could now take advantage of various new technologies as they were introduced. This of course includes the eBird Alerts that alert me to reports of species I don’t yet have in the counties I have signed up for. I generally subscribe to the counties I have lived in, as well as surrounding counties of my current home. You can also sign up to get alerts for species not on your year list for any region, but that's not much help for county ticks lists.

 

Barcharts for some of the birds I still need to find in Susquehanna County, PA.

The most recent development that has really made county listing easier is the ability to link your eBird account to the new BirdsEye app for iPhone, which I consider to be the ultimate county listing tool. The new BirdsEye makes it simple to load any of my year or life lists from eBird, and see nearby sightings of birds that are not yet on my current list. With barcharts for local abundance, it is easy to tell at a glance which birds I have a reasonable chance of finding. I have been working for quite some time to reach 5,000 ticks in Pennsylvania. In many respects this is not much of a challenge since that averages less than 100 birds in each of the 67 counties in the state. It is simply a matter of visiting enough of the counties during the right times of year to be able to see a diverse set of birds in a short amount of time. However, I now live in New York and have to take advantage of any opportunities to bird in new areas of Pennsylvania.

As luck would have it, this year's annual Pennsylvania Society for Ornithology meeting was set for the northeastern corner of the state, at the border of two counties. I had briefly birded one corner of Luzerne County but had never recorded a single species in Lackawanna. I was only about 200 birds short of my goal and was hoping that my trip and full weekend of birding in a new area would allow me to reach it. By dutifully submitting eBird checklists on the field trips I led (live from the field with BirdLog!), and keeping track of some incidental sightings (hooray for BOY Common Nighthawk that flew over a large group of us at the conference center!) I was able to keep track of exactly which birds I still needed to fill in my county lists, and where they had recently been spotted. By the end of the meeting, I was only a couple short and was able to stop in another new county for me on the way home to reach my 5,000th County Tick.

Knowing at any point exactly which birds have been seen nearby that I still needed for my county lists was nothing short of incredible. eBird and the apps based on eBird sightings have created an environment where I can spend more time out in the field, and less time at home looking through my lists to nail down which birds I still need and where to find them. I can spend more time watching the behavior of every bird I find, and learning the habitat associations that help me find birds when I am out birding in a new area. Seeing a patch of willows along a stream surrounded by pastures, and knowing just by glancing at it that I can probably find Baltimore Orioles with just a few minutes of listening, or that I can walk along that hemlock shaded stream for a couple miles and surely encounter Louisiana Waterthrushes, is knowledge picked up over hundreds of encounters with these birds and those habitats. Anything that gives me more time to make those connections is priceless, especially when I find myself too busy to bird every day like I could when I was in school.

And that is what county listing is all about for me. Sure, I am making more lists, but the fun is in applying everything I have learned about a bird and its habitats in one county to find that same bird when I find myself in unfamiliar terrain. For me, the birds are driving my lists, rather than my lists driving me to bird.

How do you keep track your of lists and has it changed over the years?

Do You See What I See? A New Visual Search Tool from Google

 

Here are two truths:
1.Some people are always looking for easier ways to do hard things.
2.Technology can be amazing.

There are a lot of people anxiously waiting for WeBIRD, the promised birdsong equivalent to Shazam and MusicID, but they may have to wait a little bit longer. Music databases can make a match to a digitally produced song, but they can’t match you singing exactly the same song. The variations in the human voice make that kind of analysis a less than exact science. A person can recognize that you are singing Happy Birthday; Shazam can’t. Similarly, there is enough variation in birdsong that it’s very difficult to get a computer to recognize the nuances. You can teach one to recognize some of the songs some of the time, but a reliable tool is not available yet.

But can we use technology to recognize visual cues and help us to ID birds? New birders are being encouraged by some to post their birding photos to the Internet in order to get an ID, instead of using field guides or birding mentors. Crowd-sourcing identification is certainly one way to handle it, but it would  be much “cleaner” if we could somehow get the computer to do the work for us, wouldn't it? Enter Google Search by Image. Seriously! You can upload an image or provide a URL to images.google.com, and Google will search for similar images. How cool is that! Just click on the little camera at the right of the search field and follow the instructions.

When I learned of this, I knew an experiment was in order! I uploaded a picture of a Hermit Thrush, clicked “Search” and waited to see how Google would handle the difficult Catharus species challenge. My uploaded image shows at the top of the screenshot below:

Can you say “Epic Fail”? None of these pictures is even close, except for the background colour tones. None were even of birds, let alone thrushes. I guess I should have expected that. Maybe it was much too challenging. How about something simpler, like a Barred Owl? The Internet is crawling with owl pictures. This should be easy!

Sigh… Not even a little bit better. More diversity in the selection of “matches”, but still no birds and certainly no owls. Maybe the whole bird has to be visible. Here’s a Burrowing Owl, Google. What can you do with this?

Um, no. But it’s interesting to see how many celebrities resemble Burrowing Owls. Brangelina? The algorithm seemed to be focussing on color-matching. What about a bird with a distinctive color and shape? Easy--Great Blue Heron!

Eureka! It matched one! Admittedly it’s the fifth image the program chose, and it somehow thought that a better match for my heron was a staged suicide scene ( in the top row), but at least it got a bird, and the right bird at that!

I was prepared to completely dismiss this function as useless, but then an interesting thing happened. A birder from Ontario sent me a picture he took while visiting Vancouver to see the Red-flanked Bluetail. It was a great photo of a bird that he (and those I showed it to) identified as a Veery, an almost unimaginable bird to be in Vancouver this time of year. But with a Brambling and a Bluetail around, never say never, right?

People send me pictures all the time, but there was something about this report that made me suspicious. Spidey-sense, some people call it. I asked for more information, which did not come. I did a little online detective work and didn’t find anything reassuring. So I posted the report--along with my reservations--on the Vancouver birding bulletin boards, mindful of those who think that all rare birds should be reported and not wanting anyone to miss out on this potential rarity. Then I remembered the Google Search by Image tool. I uploaded my suspect image--another Catharus--and guess what? Here are the results:

Epic win! The person reporting this bird was a prankster (very funny-not!), my spidey-sense was on the mark, and within seconds, Google found the image in an almost-two-year-old blog post from Massachusetts. I don’t know what motivated the hoax, but I’m delighted that the perpetrator was found out before an onslaught of inevitably frustrated birders wasted their time.

For bird ID, Google Search by Image has a very long way to go. There are some things that humans can still do better than our current technology. But today, I, and all my lookalikes below,  are giving a big alula up to Google!

Count Circle

Stevens Creek Software has just introduced Count Circle, a new birding app with a simple but interesting premise of showing the boundaries of established or potential Christmas Bird Count circles on an iOS (Apple mobile) device.  If the device also has GPS (such as an iPhone), you can see where you are relative to a circle in real time, something I know I could have used in the past when wandering near the edges of a count, especially one new to me.  

Instead of wasting time with a Gazetteer and trying to triangulate landmarks, intersections, etc. I could just peek on the screen to see if I was still inbounds.  The app also looks great for scouting, especially when switching from the map to the satellite view which gives away habitat changes, fence lines, and back roads or even trails beyond the cutoff of "normal" mappability. If the count is already in the National Audubon database you can just pull it up from the state-by-state menu. If you notice the center is off (Audubon's database is only as good as the submitted circle coordinates, often estimated from old maps), then you can drag the center to what you deem is the correct place.

Additionally, you can choose your own center (if, for example you are contemplating a new count circle and would like to experiment with boundary possibilities) and it will scribe the 7.5 mile radius for you.  You can also set a different radius for different purposes.  For example, maybe I'd like to do a local patch big year within 1 km from my house- the app allows for that.   Anyway, for $2.99 looks like a neat tool to add to the mobile-tech birding arsenal.  

Looking under the listings for Colorado, I can find the count I compile (Boulder.)

 

 

Pulling it up, I can see the overview of the whole count circle.

 

 

I can also zoom way in.  For example, I can see that most of Allens Lake / Lake of the Pines near the north side of the circle is inbounds, though the north shore isn't.

 

 

Maybe I'd like to see what a count circle centered on Hayden Lake would look like.

 

 

I just drag cross hairs to where I'd like my center to be and it will drop a pin there.

 

 

I can look at the big picture and re-adjust my center as desired.

 

 

Or I can zoom to more detail, in this case noting that if I'm heading up Highway 35, the circle ends just past the unnamed pond, right the road bends northward to cross the river.

Here's their press release:

Cupertino, California, January 22, 2013 – Stevens Creek Software, whose popular Birdwatcher's Diary app is used by birders to record and report their sightings, has released its latest iOS app – Count Circle. Count Circle contains the complete National Audubon Society (NAS) database of Christmas Bird Count (CBC) circles, with a total of 2429 different count circles in 72 different states and territories including Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, South America, and Antarctica. Using Count Circle birders can lookup and display any count circle on an interactive map, and find out exactly what is (and is not) included in the circle. Units which have GPS capability also display the user's current location, so that during a count they can determine precisely whether they are inside or outside the circle.   Although the app was released too late for this year's round of Christmas Bird Counts (which were the genesis of the idea for the app), it came just in time for the latest "Patch Challenge" being held in Texas, in which birders see how many species they can find in a 7.5-mile radius circle centered on their own home. Count Circle not only lets users create and save their own circles, it also lets them set a different radius (in miles or kilometers) should they wish to do "Patch Challenges" with more limited (or wider!) geographical scope.   Much of the data describing the locations of the circles in the NAS database seem to have been obtained before the widespread availability of GPS devices, and do not accurately reflect the correct center of the circles that are being surveyed. Count Circle lets count organizers relocate their circles, both to obtain accurate values for the centers currently being used, and to experiment with minor shifts in the center which might allow key bird areas to fall within the circle. The software even allows organizers to report such changes directly to NAS.   Christmas Bird Counts, along with the Breeding Bird Survey series that occurs in the late spring, are a key scientific tool in understanding bird populations and migration. Count Circle is designed as a tool not only to make those surveys more accurate, but also to encourage more birders to participate in them. Stevens Creek Software's other birding app, Birdwatcher's Diary, has already proven invaluable during CBCs in making the process of recording counts quick and accurate. The overwhelming response to the initial release of Count Circle suggests that it will become another valuable tool in the birder's software toolbox.    Pricing and Availability: The Stevens Creek Software web site, provides full information on all of Count Circle's features.  The app runs on all iOS devices 4.3 or later, is available for $2.99 (USD) and is priced accordingly in other regions.

 

Birding with Children

 

Giving parenting advice, I realize, can be a great way to make enemies. Just ask any mother-in-law. Better yet, just ask the recipient of any such advice: Ask any daughter-in-law. For sure, the dispensers of parenting advice—from Amy Shua to Focus on the Family to mothers-in-law everywhere—are generally hated.

Same thing, I have found, with the purveyors of birding advice. Try telling a non-lister that keeping lists is a great way to learn avian status and distribution; or explain to a chaser that you’d rather spend time at your local patch than make the eight-hour drive for a state first. Or try telling any sort of birder that he or she might have blown an ID...

And now I’m going to offer my views on both birding and parenting. I wonder if I’ll have any friends at all when this is done.
Right: On the trail in Colorado’s San Luis Valley; we’ve just seen several hundred American alligators (it’s complicated...) and a rare Mexican Duck.

To cut to the chase, I have one and only one item of advice for birding parents.

First, a brief digression.

 

Consider the following scenario. You’re in idle conversation with a friend—the sort of casual chitchat that happens dozens of times every day. It’s a conversation that, ordinarily, would be forgotten the next morning. Then your friend says something that hits you like a ton of bricks. Oh, it’s not intended as such. Indeed, your friend has already forgotten it a moment or two later. But it’s received and processed in such a manner as to be life-changing.

Come to think of it, I posted quite recently to The ABA Blog about precisely this matter. I wrote about how a birding companion, Chris Wood, casually remarked to me, “Listen to the Green-winged Teal.” I’m pretty sure he didn’t intend for that comment to alter the way I go birding. In fact, I suspect Chris had forgotten within minutes that he’d even uttered the remark. No matter, it changed my life.

The same thing happened, a while back, in the course of conversation with Virginia Maynard, well known to many ABA members for her great work through the years with ABA bird-finding guides, Winging It, and other publications. Virginia’s kids were teenagers at the time, and my first child was on the way. We’d gotten onto the topic of birding and children, and Virginia said something that’s stuck with me ever since. I suspect Virginia had forgotten the conversation within hours. But I’ll always remember what she told me.
Left: Watching for seabirds off Monterey, California.

 

“Start ’em young.”

That’s it? That’s all? That’s all she said? And that’s the entirety of my advice to birders with children?
Right: pondering geographic variation in the “white-cheeked goose” complex.

Yes, that’s it. That’s all there is to it. But there’s just one thing. We need to define “young.” You see, Virginia wasn’t talking about high school, or junior high, or even kindergarten.

That’s way too late.

 

My daughter and I spent a good part of her first day of life at the hospital window. We saw a Golden Eagle fly by, and we listened to coyotes warbling. The next few weeks, we explored the canyons, marshes, and mesas near our home in Boulder County, Colorado. We took our first out-of-state birding trip when my daughter was three months old; with Rick Wright, we birded around Tucson, Arizona, finding such regional specialties as Abert’s Towhee and Gila Woodpecker—plus a locally uncommon Swamp Sparrow. You get the picture.

My son got an even earlier start. He and I had wandered out onto a hospital balcony within two hours of his birth. (Long story, but it involved an impending blizzard, a scarcity of doctors and nurses, and a bit of a “misunderstanding” about restricted areas in the hospital.) It was nearly midnight, so my son and I tried for Great Horned Owl. A few days later, he and I and his big sister got Eastern Screech-Owl for the Boulder Christmas Bird Count. The bird was a “save”—the only one recorded for the count.
Above: Returning from High Creek Fen, in Colorado’s high country.

 

Let me clear about something. I’m talking about serious birding, “real” birding, hardcore birding.

A few years ago, when my kids were toddlers, we were birding in a blinding spring snowstorm at a local reservoir. We found a Ruff. My daughter knew what to do. She had me stay with the bird, and she raced back to the car for my cell phone.
Right: In this photo, she’s barely one year old. Today’s kids are born knowing how to use technology in the interest of furthering the cause of birding.

When my son was seven months old, he co-discovered with me the mid-summer nocturnal molt-migration of arizonae Chipping Sparrows. The discovery wouldn’t have happened without him. You see, I would have slept through those hot summer nights if it weren’t for my son’s nocturnal stirrings. But he stirred, I woke up, we went birding together in the middle of the night, and the rest is history.

My kids are a bit older now, and their ambitions are accordingly grander. The other day, my daughter learned that I’ll be camping and birding later this month in the remote canyonlands of the Colorado–New Mexico border; she’ll be there too, I’ve just been informed. Meanwhile, my son is angling for a birding trip to India.

What’s next?

 

In a nutshell, I don’t know. I’m typing this from the sidelines at my son’s soccer game. After the game, my daughter (also playing soccer right now) and son are meeting up for a visit at a computer store in Boulder.

I don’t know if my kids will continue as birders. They’re increasingly interested in Taylor Swift and the diabolical union of Star Wars and Legos. (They’re also interested in, and knowledgeable about, number theory and The Great Fugue; my wife and I still exert some influence over them…) A few years from now, when they’re teenagers, my kids may have as little interest in birding as I have in shopping, television, politics, and cooking.
Left: Working up the day’s checklist.

That’s fine. If that happens, I’m fine with it. Such an outcome would mean, in some sense, that I’d get my life—or, at least my birding life—back to normal. I’d be back to birding the way I did it in grade school, college, grad school, and early adulthood.

And if that happens, here’s the big question: Will I be able to sustain the turbo-charged pace of birding from my earliest years as a parent? Let’s not beat around the bush: I got more intensely into birding—way more into birding—when my daughter was born. And I cranked it up a few notches further with the birth of my son. Will I be able to keep it up? Or will I go back to the comparatively subdued birding tempo from my teens and twenties? I wonder.
Right: A close encounter on a backcountry road.

 

Here comes the preachy part. (Cf. Amy Shua, Focus on the Family, mothers-in-law everywhere.) I’ve come to realize that are two prevalent courses of action for birders with young children. Course of action #1: Just clock out for 10 years; simply stop birding while the kids are young. Course of action #2: Keep on birding while the kids are young, but do it on your own time.

All I can say is: What a pity. Even: What a waste. What could be more wholesome for youngsters—grade-schoolers and preschoolers, toddlers and infants, even newborns—than going birding? Mind you, it’s not the birding per se that’s wholesome. Rather, it’s the experience of beholding, interacting with, and beginning to understand the whole wide world. Young children who go birding get to see blue whales and dawn redwoods, snowstorms in the Rockies and thunderstorms in the Sonoran Desert, rattlesnakes on the prairie and sunrise at Montauk Point.
Above: A visit to the Department of Zoology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

But never mind them. What about me? I’ll say it again: Since becoming a parent, I’ve done more birding, seen better birds, and simply enjoyed birding more than ever before.

And remember, the kids aren’t even teenagers yet.

Folks, don’t wait for the kids to be “old enough”—whatever that means. Just do it. Just strap ’em in, buckle ’em up, and go. Go for it.

 

I started out by saying it’s perhaps not the smartest thing to proffer advice on birding, parenting, or especially birding and parenting. Well, don’t blame me!—this was all Virginia Maynard’s idea. And a few other folks: Betsy Blakeslee; Michael and Andrea Banks; and, nearly 30 years ago, Bill Fink. If you’re one of the aforementioned persons, you’re doubtless scratching your head right now. Regardless, you said something—in passing, and casually so—that stuck with me. You made a difference. You played an important role in ushering in the greatest years of my life.
Right: Good Times! Birding with children is a great way of getting your name in the police blotter in small towns all across America. (Check out the incident at 6:48 a.m.)

 

Mic up that iPhone: Follow Up

I think I still have a ways to go before I'd call myself an authority on using an iPhone (or similar device) to produce bird recordings, but I've learned a lot since my initial post on this topic about a month ago.  Let me comment on three aspects of acquiring bird sounds on an iPhone.

1) Getting sounds into your device.

• Good:  If a bird is close or loud enough, the built-in mic can capture acceptable recordings.
• Better:  An iPhone/iPod/etc. specific mic can add a lot of reach.  I'm still happy with the  Edutige EIM-001 i-Microphone Voice Recorder- it is small (almost too small- easy to misplace) & fairly cheap and really boosts the audio.  The sound quality isn't necessarily professional, but not bad for documenting & researching bird sounds.
• Best: A high-quality shotgun mic:  David La Puma and others have figured out that an iPhone/iPod/etc. can be a great digital bird sound recorder if you have a quality shotgun mic to capture vocalizations.  The problem is that normal mics won't record to the iPhone/iPod/etc. jack, which is designed for both input and output (iPhone headphones have a built-in mic for phone conversations, talking to Siri, etc.)  An adapter is needed if you want to pipe in sound from a good mic, & fortunately these are available through 3rd party manufacturers.  For example, the kV Connections iPhone 1/8" Microphone Adapter will allow input from a powered mic with a 1/8" (3.5mm) jack.  kV Connections also makes other adapters for different mic types so check them out if you are looking for an input solution.

2) Selecting an app for your recordings.

• Good: Use the device's built-in voice memo app.  Free, works fine.
• Better (maybe?):  Use a 3rd-party recording app (free or cheap) if its features and interface are more to your liking.  For now, I've settled on Recorder (free).  Recordings are pretty easy to get off the phone and onto your computer.  File types are limited to AIFF or MP3, probably fine for dabblers like myself.
• Best:  Use a professional field recording app like FiRe 2 ($6).  Link over to see the impressive list of features this app boasts...

3) Selecting sound processing software to use on your computer.  I'm too far out of my league to offer much meaningful insight here.  Perhaps folks with more experience can offer suggestions for us in the comments or in another blog post??  

• Good:  Use free audio editing software like Audacity.  It has some basic filters, produces spectrograms, & the price is right!  Ted Floyd has figured out some neat tricks with Audacity & I hope he'll comment on these or offer up a post on the topic...
• Also Good:  Cornell's free Raven Light lets users record, save, and visualize sounds as spectrograms and waveforms.  Editing options are limited, though.   Andrew Spencer offers some great tips & tricks to using this software at Earbirding.com.
• Better/Best:  Sound guru Nathan Pieplow extols Adobe Audition on his Earbirding.com blog & offers Audition editing tips & tricks in one of his posts.  Can anyone comment on Cornell's Raven Pro or other options to consider for serious bird sound editing??

Vocalizing Canyon Wren © Bill Schmoker, Jefferson County, Colorado, March 2009

BirdsEye BirdLog- have it yet?

< Side Note:  I'm still working on some stuff to refine recording bird vocalizations on my iPhone and will update that in my next ABA Blog installment.>

After a quiet "soft launch" period, BirdsEye recently announced a new app for iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPodTouch) & Android that lets users input checklists to eBird directly from their smart device.  While not an eBird or Cornell product, this is the only mobile app using the official eBird data entry API (Application Program Interface).  Team eBird worked closely with the developer to ensure ease of use and maintain top data quality.  eBird endorses this software and a portion of the proceeds support eBird so that's cool, too.  Jump over to eBird's detailed comments about this app here...  Entering checklists from the field has some profound implications- team eBird has also authored some suggested best practices for BirdLog data entry.  The short article is well worth the read if you are going to use the app.

I've been using the app for a little over a week now and I think it is great.  Here's what stands out as really nice so far for me:

• When I'm ready to start a checklist it will pull up hotspots and my personal birding locations based on my device's locating abilities (GPS, cell phone towers, and/or wireless network location.)  You can also create a new location if needed.

• Instead of the entire ABA list, checklists are based on current eBird location & time filters (though of course you can add a rarity that wouldn't be expected in the area.  If so you get a confirmation request similar to the process on the regular web page.)
• Instead of long scrolls up and down to add birds, you can search by name or, even faster, by banding code.
• Each time you enter a bird or birds, it will add to whatever you already have.  For example, if I enter 3 RBGU then I'll have three Ring-billed Gulls for the checklist.  If I later see three more, I enter 2 RBGU and my checklist will then show a total of five Ring-billed Gulls.  So it is a sophisticated tally counter in that regard (see below.)

• If you aren't a banding code fan, you can also just start typing in the common name and your choices will quickly narrow.  Then you touch the species you want and the new tally will be added (see below.)

• If your number is mis-entered (perhaps you change your mind on an ID or whatever,) you can also subtract birds by entering negative numbers.
• If you begin a checklist when you start birding at a particular site, when you are done it will calculate the time spent birding for you with a single push of a button.
• Overall it is a lot easier to navigate & enter data through this app on my iPhone than it is to use the eBird site on the small screen!

 

 The app will undoubtedly get better in future updates, and I'd especially like to see:

• Checklist sharing from the app.
• Ability to edit submitted checklists (you can edit in-progress lists but once submitted, changes have to be through the eBird site.)
• Age/Sex/Breeding Code section of comments (currently only the general comments box appears.)
• For GPS-enabled devices it would be nice if the app could keep track of distance traveled to compliment the automatic timing option.
• Perhaps a mobile version of the "My eBird" and "Explore Data" stuff- things like personal lists, bar charts, etc.

The developers are very interested in birder feedback, so if you get this app and have ideas for making it better be sure to send along your comments here:  [email protected].  BirdsEye has also put out a nice little demo video to showcase the app- check it out (this shows an earlier version of the software but you'll get the general idea):

 

Happy Holidays

I hope you all had a great holiday season and wish you a happy new year!  

I have had a few recent emails about my last Geared for Birding column in Winging It.  Some regarded difficulty with some of the TinyURL links for some of the gear ideas I listed.  Here are the live links for your clicking convenience:

Kleen Kanteen widemouth stainless steel bottle 

LockDown binocular harness

BinoBib protective cover

Liberty Graphics David Sibley fine printed bird designs T-shirts 

Gitzo 2-way fluid birding tripod head 

Snackworms live or roasted wax worms 

Sheltered mealworm/waxworm bluebird feeder

RainCoat protective camera cover 

Peterson Birds of North America app

Sigma 50-500mm Super Telephoto Zoom lens

Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm lens

Think Tank StreetWalker HardDrive 

ABA Sales Partners:  

Eagle Optics

Buteo Books

Song Bird Coffee

 

I also had a few inquiries about 4-section tripods suitable for travel as I mentioned them in the column.  I'm a fan of Gitzo carbon tripod legs because of their construction quality, stability-to-weight ratio, solid locking mechanisms, and durability.  They aren't cheap but neither are great optics, and I don't like my tripod to be the limiting factor in my scoping & digiscoping activities.  Gitzo's numbering system also is really easy to understand, with their Series 0 being the lightest-rated models (up to 11 lbs.) and Series 4 being the heaviest (but out of the realm of all but the most monstrous of monster camera rigs.)  For compact scopes or those wanting to squeeze every gram out of their system, Series 0 legs can work, though I think for full-sized scopes a Series 1 tripod (rated for up to 17 lbs.) will give more stability.  Typical models come with three leg sections but going to 4-section tripods allows the legs to collapse into a smaller package, handy for traveling.  The downside is a bit more cost (as each leg has an additional locking mechanism) and a bit more set-up time.

Here's a nice 4-section Series 0 tripod, the GT-0541 Carbon Mountaineer.

And here's the Series 1 equivalent, the GT-1541 Carbon Mountaineer.

Gitzo also has Safari Series tripods, geared towards birders and wildlife photographers with a low-profile green finish and dust, mud, grit & water-resistant locking mechanisms.  For example, see the GT-1540S Carbon Safari 4-section tripod.

Gitzo's Basalt-composite tripods are a wee bit heavier but more affordable, and retain most of the brand's advantages.  Take a peek at the GT-1840C 4-section Basalt tripod.

Many birders have used Bogen/Manfrotto legs, and there are also 4-section offerings in this line.  These are going to be a little heavier than their Gitzo cousins and in my opinion have balkier locking mechanisms, but are still very high quality and have a solid track record.  A lighter option, equivalent to Gitzo's Series 0, is the Manfrotto 190CXPRO4  while the Manfrotto 055CXPRO4 has a load rating similar to Gitzo's Series 1.

I'm sure there are other great options out there that I'm not familiar with- feel free to leave any suggestions you may have in the comments!!

Enjoy- Bill Schmoker

Spencer Schaffner: Binocular Vision

Spencer Schaffner’s Binocular Vision starts from the simple and important observation that field guides—like all texts—“do cultural work.” Behind and beyond their stated purposes, field guides affirm assumptions and create expectations in their users; Binocular Vision is a critical exploration of those assumptions and expectations, and many of the conclusions the book offers will be an unsettling surprise to many of its birding readers.

In five short chapters, Schaffner argues that modern birdwatching as practiced in the United States—and as reflected and, simultaneously, formed by its central texts—is not conservationist and environmentalist at all, but rather serves to efface the huge problems facing our birds and their habitats. Schaffner finds that most field guides and most birding neutralize our awareness of environmental challenges by constructing birds as separate from their physical settings and by presenting even the most toxic of artificial landscapes as benign. Along the way, the author serves up an indictment of some of North American birding’s most prominent and cherished institutions and practices; at times badly overstated, the book’s criticisms should nevertheless make all of us into more carefully self-aware birders.

Schaffner begins with a historical overview of the foundations of American birdwatching and its explicit link to forms of conservation at the end of the nineteenth century; he demonstrates well how the popular texts of the day joined sentiment, anthropomorphism, and moral judgment to enlist readers on the side of the birds. Schaffner contrasts these early works, chief among them guides written by Florence Merriam (later Bailey) and Mabel Osgood Wright, with the more strictly “technical,” soi-disant scientific approach taken starting in the 1920s.

The review is a welcome one, but what I miss in this chapter is a discussion of the evolution of the cultural gendering of birdwatching. It is no accident that these early writers were women or that so many of their books are addressed to children; and it is no coincidence that the re-gendering of serious birding as male, a status it still occupies today, was accomplished by stripping the field guide of its “feminine” features, replacing tales of bird family life with measurements and complex terminologies.

Schaffner goes on in Chapter 2 to explore the disconnect between the idea of birdwatching as biophily and the “management” required to sustain many species. Many birders will describe their hobby as a celebration of life; in fact, though, as the author points out, many of the birder’s most beloved objects are saved only at the expense of a great deal of death. For example, gulls are culled—killed—to protect plovers and terns (Schaffner misses the bitter irony that the abundance of the large gulls today is due in large part to the cessation of human persecution in the nineteenth century). Mute Swans have gone from icons of feathered beauty to a menace requiring control. Perhaps the most eloquent example of all goes almost unmentioned here: we poison thousands of blackbirds to keep them from eating the sunflower seed we’ll feed to our backyard birds in the winter. I wish, too, that Schaffner had enlarged his discussion of crow hunting and crow control to include the eradication two decades ago of Western Jackdaws from Canada, the perfect illustration of the tension between the birder’s desire to observe and the birdwatcher’s need to protect “good” birds from the potentially bad.

The most fascinating section of Binocular Vision is the discussion in Chapter 3 of efforts in field guides and in fine art to reverse the isolation of birds from their settings. Schaffner’s prime example here is American Bird Conservancy’s All the Birds, which intentionally places many of its bird portraits against such sadly realistic backgrounds as landfills and airports. The author discovers an ambiguity in many such scenes—are the birds shown as threatened by encroaching development or as adapting to it?—but their import remains clear: birds belong to places, and too many places have been altered by human activities.

The plate from All the Birds that Schaffner selects for close examination in this chapter is perhaps even more interesting than his discussion recognizes. The painter, Jack Griggs, places his American Pipits and Horned Larks on what looks like pavement, with urban San Francisco in the background and a large plane in the air above. Oddly, and possibly in contradiction of Schaffner’s larger argument about the book, single Sprague’s and Red-throated Pipits and a Sky Lark—all in classic “technical” field guide poses—float at the top of the plate, disassociated from any habitat context and from each other. Surely this says something about the painter’s or the designer’s attitudes to rarity and difficulty, and it may well also reflect some of that ancient eastern bias that lingers still in so many field guides. Here and occasionally elsewhere in Binocular Vision, the reader is left wanting to learn more.

Given the author’s expertise in the study of new media, Chapter 4, “Technojumping into Electronic Field Guides,” should have been the book’s best. Schaffner notes the tendency in some of the new e-guides to simply reproduce book pages on a computer screen, at best with the addition of sound files. He also hints at the new types of birderly socialization incipient in some online guides. What the author does not point out is that the navigation required to use these guides in many cases reverts, ironically, to the key structures at the base of some of the earliest technical field guides; in this sense, the e-guide, for all its technological pride, in fact represents a step back a hundred years or more.

Schaffner saves his most controversial points for last. In “Birding on Toxic Land,” he implicates competitive birding and listing in the perpetuation of a conservative conservation ethic and the cover-up of some of this country’s most screaming environmental problems. Eagerly birding sewage ponds, landfills, and toxic waste sites “overwrites those sites as healthy”; Schaffner contrasts the near-complacence of such behavior with the “radical image events” staged by more focused environmentalist groups. He finds that the strategies favored by moderate conservation organizations, especially fund-raising, are in fact readily co-opted by industry and its friends to perpetuate rather than to combat environmental degradation—a serious charge, and one leveled here squarely at such influential groups as New Jersey Audubon and such successful events as the World Series of Birding. Overstatement is one of my favorite rhetorical tools, too, but I believe that Schaffner ignores a number of examples where local birding groups have in fact pressed hard for the improvement of toxic environments, sometimes (as in the case of Tucson Audubon and the Avra Valley Wastewater Treatment Plant) at a clear cost to the birding opportunities those sites had offered before their clean-up.

I encourage every birder to read and to ponder this important book. A word to the wise: though Schaffner carefully avoids much of the critical jargon available to him, his prose here (surprisingly, to those of us who have read other of his writings) is more than a bit of a slog, full of repetition and infelicity. But stick with it. You’ll find yourself alternately fascinated and infuriated, and continually inspired to think through these issues yourself. 

 

Figuring Out Furry Friends Just Got Easier

OK- I know this is a bird-oriented blog, but about any birder I know also is interested in lots of natural history including the wild mammals we encounter on our birding endeavors.  I'll admit to several birding trips I've been on, both alone or as a group leader, where a mammal was the day's highlight. 

Princeton University Press, a long-time leader in birding publications, has just released their first field guide app for iPhone (with Blackberry & Android versions promised soon): Mammals of North America. The app is based on the popular and best-selling field guide by Roland Kays and Don Wilson.  The guide is designed by Cool Ideas, LLc, who also designed the Sibley eGuide to Birds.  The architecture of the app is very similar to the Sibley eGuide and I think it is an intuitive, friendly & information-rich interface.  For those wishing for a comprehensive guide to our taxonomic classmates without dragging another book along, this is an amazing resource to squeeze into one's smartphone.  The publishers were kind enough to send me a review copy and I know it will earn a permanent spot on the virtual bookshelf I carry in my pocket about everywhere.

A few weeks ago I was alerted to a bat roosting along the corner of a wall at a local fire station.  I snapped a pic but hadn't had the time or impetus to research its identity until this app came along, so I'll use it as a test case to give you some examples of how it all works.

 
Bat!  But which one??

The app begins with a single simple menu page with options to look at mammal lists alphabetically or taxonomically.  This can be done by common or scientific name, selectable near the top.  There's also a smart search that groups mammals by general type (very helpful to a novice like me) and a button to set one's location and limit the choices to that area.  Another button leads to a gallery with mammal tracks (4 pages organized by similar shapes for comparison) and one more link accesses a listing feature that you can keep track of sightings with.  Finally, there's a treasure trove of information under the "More" button at the top right, which leads to extra information such as help files, a glossary (I had to look up calcar and interfemoral membrane when I read about my bat), and bonus pinch-zoomable ID plates.  Of special interest to pelagic birders are two plates of bow wave-riding dolphins & whales as seen from above and a plate showing whale & dolphin spout patterns & dive sequences.

I thought I'd start by setting my location to research my bat.  You can manually enter a zip code, but I made life easy and let my phone's GPS tell the app where I was.  When I then went to the Smart Search and chose the "Fly: wing membrane mostly naked" group, I had 10 species of bats to choose from (whittled down from the 47 listed for all of North America, accessible by selecting the fictional ZIP code 00000.)  Glancing through these, a match of Big Brown Bat seemed quite good to my novice eyes.

 

 

For any of the species, there are supplementary images (such as scat, tracks, a photograph for some species, etc), descriptive text, a range map, and a sound interface.  As with the Sibley eGuide, you can tap the top or bottom half of the split screen to enlarge that section.  I thought it was pretty cool that they even had sounds for a bat (the frequencies lowered to put them into human audible range in this case.) 

 

 

 

BirdsEye App Coming to Android...and the World

I assume most of the folks reading this blog are familiar with the mobile app called BirdsEye. BirdsEye was the first (and still the only) app to sync with data in the eBird database at Cornell Lab of Ornithology. By displaying bird location data from eBird onto an expandable map, BirdsEye shows you what birds are being seen nearby, can direct you to birding hotspots, and helps pinpoint the location of "target" birds -- like those not on your life list yet.

BirdsEye has been a powerful tool, but initially, "syncing" with eBird was a one-way proposition. That is, your iPhone could receive new data points in the field over 3G, but you could not submit your observations from BirdsEye to eBird on site. Instead, you'd have to go home, fire up your computer, log onto eBird, and do it "the old-fashioned way." Funny how fast these 'appy-type' things go out of vogue...

But that will change soon, according to David Bell, co-owner of BirdsEye. Developers are expecting to roll out their first-generation data-entry from the field feature by late April. 

Three other exciting updates are just around the bend:

1. BirdsEye goes to Android. Beta testing starts later this month. This is great news for Android users, who felt a little out of the running when birding apps began to hit the scene.  

Across the mobile world, developers are busy playing catch up on the Android OS and the next 12 months should bring more interesting options--especially for birding. This should also give iPhones a run for their money.

2. BirdsEye goes worldwide. In keeping with eBird's recent world-wide expansion, BirdsEye will soon have worldwide coverage. This feature will be useful when traveling beyond US borders. Now, you can finally log the bird when you're standing at the Southmost Preserve and see a Black-vented Oriole flitting in a shrub across the Rio Grande in Mexico land space!

3. Share your sightings: Users will soon be able to share sightings with one another from the field. Send an email to the listserv directly from your device, or send your checklist to your birding buddy via text. 

Assuming all goes to plan, these major upgrades should roll out by April or early May.

The full-featured BirdsEye app (with 857 North American species including rare and notables notifications) runs $19.99 in the iTunes store. Or try BirdsEye Lite (135 species) for $1.99.

For more information, go to www.getbirdseye.com.

 P.S. Please join us for my presentation on mobile birding apps at the Biggest Week in American Birding this May near the warbler capital of the world (Magee Marsh) along western Lake Erie. Besides giving an overview of the current slate of birding apps, I'll conduct a drawing of free Redeem Codes for your favorite birding apps. Come try your luck!