Birding and Technology

Rare Old World Shrike visiting the California Coast at Manchester State Park.  The jury is still out on the ID of this bird that appears to be a first year bird in the beginning stages of molt to adult plumage.  If the bird stays long enough there hopefully will be a definitive Identification.  It is definitely  not a Brown Shrike which is what it was first being reported as.

 In the past couple of weeks, the Northwest and for that matter, North America has been in the grip of a small epidemic of bird fever. An Old World Shrike, possibly a Red-backed Shrike, has shown up on the northern coast of California and it may turn out to be the first record of this bird in North America. So, how did all these birders become infected with the fever, for which there is no cure by the way?


Thirty years ago, if a bird watcher found a rare bird, they would call all their local friends on the phone and let them know about it and some of them would actually get in a car and maybe even drive to the next county or maybe even farther to try to relocate it. The word might spread over time but by the time most birders heard about it, especially birders who lived more that say a hundred miles away, the bird would be long gone. Then someone came up with a tape recording machine that you could attach to your home phone and record a message if the person were not home. Some bright birder came up with the idea of getting a dedicated phone number and using one of these machines to do two things. You could dial the number and either leave a rare bird report as a message after the beep, or you could wait for the second beep and then the messages would play back so you could listen to all the recent rare bird reports. It was a little cumbersome but it worked. Of course if you were from out of state, you had to call long distance and pay the long distance fees. This system worked well from the late 70's till about the turn of the century.

The old phone answering machine

The internet of course changed all that. List serves were set up so people could sign up and view daily even minute by minute reports of bird sightings and suddenly the whole world would know about any rare bird anywhere and keep up with it's presence and plan trips to view it. Most countries and states have bird list serves usually operated by volunteers who monitor the postings and manage the server so that the word can get out in seconds. Most states have more than one list serve. Here is an example of a couple of list serves that I use for Oregon bird sightings.


This one for Central Oregon, http://birding.aba.org/maillist/OR02


and this one for the whole state. http://birding.aba.org/maillist/OR01


Several other areas in the state operate list serves but these are the primary two I look at.


Of course the smart phone has cranked this up even more because now you can view all these sites on your phone wherever you are. You can also post to the list from where you are which is almost instant notification.  A few months ago there was a Snowy Owl over in the town of Dallas in the Willamette Valley. According to the report on line, it was sitting on a roof in a neighborhood. Of course I had to go chase it. We drove the neighborhood for several hours and could not locate it. It was getting late and we had no plans to stay the night so we started slowly heading out of town and back to Central Oregon. I got the bright idea to check the Oregon Birders On Line forum one more time and sure enough, about an hour previously, someone had reported the Owl in a field about half a mile from the neighborhood where it had been seen the day before.

We now have GPS available. First they were stand alone devices but soon, GPS was added to our phones so now if we know the coordinates, Elsie Molly will direct us right to the bird via google maps. Pretty cool. If you have enough time and gas/travel money you can chase rare birds all over the world and have a pretty good success rate. I have friends that do this. You can sign up for the North American Rare Bird Alert and pay a yearly fee and you will get emails to your phone whenever a rare bird is reported

Another example of ebirding, in September we were driving east across the top of Ohio on I-80 I checked the Ohio listserve and discovered there was a rare bird at a state park on Lake Erie only 8 miles off the interstate.  About an hour after we left the freeway, I had this bird in my sights.  a Northern Wheatear, that breeds in northern North America including Alaska, all of Europe, and wingers in Africa.

Then of course there are the Apps. Most birders have at least one bird book App. These apps have all the info on the birds, their life history, range, field marks, and everything you need to identify the bird and appreciate it as well. There are also photographs for most birds as well as recorded songs that you can listen to so you can recognize the bird even if you can't see it. Birding buy ear is very helpful because you will often hear the bird well before you see it and in some cases you may never see it. Most birders count birds they hear only,  as long as they have had a prior good look at the bird at some point.


I have Ibird Pro and Audubon Birds as two Apps on my phone.


https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whatbird.pro&hl=en


As you can see, many companies such as Audubon have apps for other wildlife and natural history as well as bird apps for foreign countries.


http://www.audubonguides.com/field-guides/mobile-apps.html


I just learned of a new app this week developed by Columbia University and Smithsonian Institute. You take a photo of the bird with your phone and the app uses facial recognition software to give you possibilities of its ID. There's another App being developed that will analyze bird songs and identify the bird that is singing. There are endless possibilities, new technologies are showing up every day.


One of the newer technologies comes from Cornell University. I believe you students are aware of their web site and are using it as one of you many tools to enjoy birds and learn more about them.
They developed Ebird, a real-time, online checklist and database launched by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society. It allows people to note their sightings from around the world, sightings which are tallied into an interactive map. The geo-tagging function allows users to then see hot spots of bird sightings, like a birder’s version of Google Maps The purpose of the site is to get all birders to start listing the birds they see in a given location and this will create a very useful database for research and conservation efforts.


You sign up for an account and then you can fill out a report with the location and the bird you saw there. It is made easy because you pick a location that pops up a list of the most likely birds you would see at that location and you check off which ones you saw and how many and it is entered in a data base that you have access to any time. It monitors your bird lists for your Patch, County, State, Country and how many birds you have seen in these locations for the year as well as for as long as you have been using the site so your life list can be here as well. It's a huge project and it will be interesting to see where this technology takes us. To answer the question I posed in the first paragraph as to how did I catch the bird fever, I have ebird's north American rare bird alert come to my email once a day.

a screen capture of my current bird lists on Ebird.

I have been using this site for two years and here is an example of my current data. I would encourage you to use this reporting method if you pursue the birding hobby. And I know some of you are already birders. :=) Oh, and there is an App called Birdlog that has the reporting lists exactly like the web page and the GPS of your phone will find the hotspot on the map based on your location and if you have service you can create the list on the fly and submit it before you leave the location. It is fully editable at any time.


http://ebird.org/


I guess some of the first Technology involving birding would have to do with optics. If you don't have good binoculars and scopes, your enjoyment and success at the hobby of birding will be limited. I sometimes challenge myself and leave my binoculars home on my morning walks but not often because inevitably I will see a bird that I can't identify because it is too far away and I could miss a real rarity if I don't have any optics.


Like everything else, binoculars have made technical advancements in the past decades that allow birders to have very clear views of birds a long ways away. This technology doesn't come without a price and many birders spend several thousand dollars to assure they have a clear view of the birds they want to see. You can buy a pair of binoculars for $25 but I assure you your eyes will not like you if you use them for long periods of birding and the image will be somewhat limited. The rule of thumb is get the best binoculars you can afford.


Another technology that could be overlooked is biotechnology. Scientists have made great strides in the last fifty years when in comes to identifying individual species. Many groups of plants and animals have species that are so similar it is difficult to tell them apart. This is a complex subject but suffice it to say that in the bird world, the use of DNA technology has allowed the ornithologists to further separate some species and this has resulted in new species being added to the number of birds in a region or the world. In 1980 there were about 9,975 species of bird in the world. Today the number of species has grown to close to 10, 300 due to these splits. A recent example is in the bird that was known as the Sage Sparrow. This bird is now divided into two species, the Sagebrush Sparrow and the Bell's Sparrow. The range of the Bell's sparrow is primarily southern California and tiny parts of SW Nevada and W Arizona. The Sagebrush Sparrow ranges in the great basin as well as Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and south into Mexico. Two years ago these were both considered the same sparrow but DNA has proven them to be different. They do have subtle color differences and their calls are different but with the same characteristics.

I was lucky to be included in a study that some local Arizona Ornithologists were doing to monitor the winter range of the "New" Bells Sparrow, which was split from the Sage Sparrow.  I and found both species and took these pictures before they started their study and they were very appreciative of my discovery because it cut way down on the time they would have needed to find them.  You can see how subtle the differences are.

Yet another technology that is being used by birders is the same tracking device that meteorologists use to follow tornadoes and thunderstorms. Migrating birds show up in blue circles sort of like rain does on the Doppler radar map and by coordinating models of wind, you can plot what days and where a good migration will be taking place.


Check out this web site for monitoring active migration:


http://www.aos.wisc.edu/weather/wx_obs/Nexrad.html


You don't have to be a geekhead to enjoy the hobby of birding and I have birding friends who don't have smart phones and in some cases computers but for me, it is one of many tools to increase my enjoyment of the hobby. Happy birding.


The big year list is slowly getting longer.  Here is an update.

423 Rufus Hummingbird, Rt 26 at the spring, Oregon
424 Pigeon Guillemott, Oregon Rt 101 overlook
425 Mew Gull, Astoria, Oregon
426 Red-necked Grebe, the mouth of Birgen Creek, Ft Bragg, California
427 Black Oystercatcher, the mouth of Birgen Creek, Ft Bragg, California
428 Black Turnstone, the mouth of Birgen Creek, Ft Bragg, California
429 Harlequin Duck, the mouth of Birgen Creek, Ft Bragg, California
430 Old World Shrike, possibly Red-backed, Manchester State Park, California
431 Wrentit, Manchester State Park, California
432 Band-tailed Pigeon, Rt 1, Northern California
433 Pacific Slope Flycatcher, Rt 1 Northern California