Do you have a smart phone? Mine is smarter than I am!
Do you have a wonderful array of apps (applications)? I can check the live football scores, check the runners or results of the racing, look at a map of where I am, convert $$ to ££, have a bet, look at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or the Guardian, check what’s on TV today, look at my calendar, check my bank balance (and pay bills), send a bunch of flowers, listen to BBC radio, see how the FTSE is doing, check the latest political opinion polls, find out what that star is called, plan Tube journeys, get onto the right Tube carriage to minimise journey time, book a hotel room, check the weather forecast for anywhere on earth – oh! and make phone calls too.
I also have some wildlife apps. In particular, I have the Audubon Guides bird guide (which was quite useful in the USA – particularly for calls), the Birdguides butterfly app (which I think is excellent), the Birdguides app which tells me what rare birds are near me or far away and the BTO Birdtrack app.
I use the Birtdtrack app a lot now – it means that you can enter your data as you walk around and there is no sitting at the computer afterwards that needs to be done. I slightly miss the sitting at the computer with a cup of tea and a Digestive biscuit,k but that’s progress for you! It does take what seems like slightly too many clicks to enter each species, which is fine towards the end of a visit, but slightly irritating when you see 25 species as soon as you arrive somewhere and spend quite a while tapping them all in. maybe I am doing something wrong. However, the app does save me time overall, and, for that, I am grateful.
What apps should I consider getting?
I’d quite like an app which tells you which birds were present while you were out birdwatching but which you missed – can someone make one of those please? I suspect it would be a humbling experience to know what one had missed or misidentified – it would be for me anyway.
Or what about the app that tells you whether you should head to Scilly or Fair Isle weeks in advance because it is so clever?
Or the app that tells you when particular butterflies will be flying weeks in advance?
The app that tells you how far Hurricane Fly will win the Champion Hurdle would be a good one too!
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I want an app that can listen to birdsong and then tell me which birds are singing! I’m getting better at IDing birds when I see them but am still quite rubbish at identifying calls/songs… we have an app with bird calls on it but they never seem to quite match what we hear.
Oh, and an app that can ID a bird from a fuzzy, blurred, distant silhouette would be good too…
Not asking too much is it?
😉
Anne, I understand that one is being developed. I wait to hear it.
Hi Mark, the BirdTrack app goes some way to telling you what you didn’t see, but it’s not a specific buit-in feature. You can use the local hotspots feature to interrogate the local area, and the year targets feature will tell you what species you need, and if they are in the area, then obviously missing from your daily visit? Not perfect, but hopefully still useful. Thanks for the comments on the number of clicks. We are aware of this, but I’m struggling with the code to improve it!! Iain
Ian D
I may be suggesting how my granny can suck eggs . When you log the location if you were presented with the last record then one could just amend it then save.
I was keeping paper notes ( and loosing them) when I realised that birds were mainly using a sheep grazed field every Jan- Feb –March. It used to get really busy with Redwings and Fieldfares preparing to depart with Starlings (remember them) and Jackdaws and gulls patrolling over head. I never worked out what they were eating.
But I obviously don’t have as big a coffee cup as Mark and I got fed up clicking just to list more or less the same species with different numbers every day.
Hi Andrew, thanks for your thoughts, which I think apply to ‘patch listing’ in general, whether it’s on a notebook, PC or through an App. It can get dull and boring I guess (although I haven’t encountered that myself) but (in my opinion) it’s only through amassing repeat samples like ‘lists’ from as many volunteers as possible will we have any hope of spotting trends of local and national species? That gives me the drive to keep adding the same birds week by week…
On my notebook computer, in the sidebar below your Tw*tface feed, I have started getting lurid images of women with overdeveloped flight muscles and not many clothes on who for some reason would like to meet me. Is this what these Smart phones are for?
Filbert – that is indeed strange. Why do you think they want to meet you?
That’s what Mrs Cobb said. We’ve never been to Thailand – I know there are cultural differences but why would these wimmins want to meet a 94 year old curmudgeon?
Anyway, now I’ve installed the Firefox add-ins on my notebook that block the 17 trackers, advertisers, analytics, social and content requests on your page they have disappeared. As has your Tw*tter feed …
These unwanted approaches are not so much Smart but Dumb. Backalong, when I lived in Ciderspace, I kept getting spam asking me if I wanted a bigger pianist. Anyone who actually knew me knew I didn’t have a piano.
I,ve no intention of joining the “jet age” myself. I prefer to look and listen to wildlife “in the field.” Although I suppose this is considered old fashioned these days. I think there is still no substitute to the “outdoor university” and personal experience. There are people who can quote facts from computers etc. but have a limited knowledge compared to the “older generation” who are past it?
I’m a smartphone user but I think the birding app trend is the death knell of the field notebook. Field notebooks were a rare breed before the smartphone revolution and now I feel that apps are the signal for the its final demise.
I’ve noticed that over the years my own field notebook use has changed from listing everything, sometimes with lots of notes, even some drawings, to simple scribbles or marks to denote my days birding. I no longer take note every day. I enter my birding records in to my Excel spreadsheet but only use my notebook for birding trips.
I’ve tried a couple of apps for recording sightings in the field and none came close for speed or usability of my notebook and pencil. I’d rather spend my birding time birding, not fiddling with apps, and data entry left for dark nights and long winter days with a coffee and cake at hand 😉
Did anyone else spot in the latest issue of Birdwatch mag (close to Mark’s heart) the feature titled ‘use a notebook to develop your skills’ – I wonder how many skipped by this in their search of references to digital content and apps?
Long live the field notebook!
Steve – well said and thank you. Although, I don’t really agree. Well, I suppose I mean that what works for you doesn’t work so well for me.
I want to keep some records of my birding and most of them are kept, unreliably, in my head! For my local patch I do like to look up when I last saw a Jay (this morning and a couple of years ago) and putting the records into Birdtrack allows me to do that fairly easily. so if I’m going to use Birdtrack then i might as well use the app in the field too. It saves time overall.
And it has the added advantage of making my observations available to other parties – BTO, RSPB and locally. I like that!
Each to their own, though! thanks for a great comment.