An Experiment with My Phone - the BirdNET App (Identify Bird Songs with Your Phone!)

I downloaded an app several weeks ago, but never tried it out until today.  I do all right identifying birds when I SEE them, but I'm not very good at identifying their songs, so when I saw this app reviewed in a magazine, I decided to download it.

Wednesday I sat out on my front porch and opened the app on my phone and let it listen to the sounds around me.  It shows a spectrogram of the sounds it detects.  You select a section of the spectrogram to be analyzed, and in a few seconds, if the sound was clear enough, you get a result, with the degree of certainty of the result.  Here are four examples from Wednesday morning.  I circled the trace of each birdsong in blue.

The first one is a goldfinch.  It's kind of faint, but you can see the fluid song repeating.  The second is a downy woodpecker, making short sharp sounds.  The third is a house finch with a fluid, random song.  The fourth is a cardinal, and you can see its chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp on the spectrogram.

The birds the app identified Wednesday morning included those four plus a cedar waxwing, a pileated woodpecker, an eastern meadowlark, a chipping sparrow, a tufted titmouse, a blue-gray gnatcatcher, a brown-headed cowbird, and a Carolina chickadee, all birds I've seen in our yard.

After just a very short time, I was able to guess what bird was sounding off before having the app analyze the song, at least for the more vocal birdies - the cardinal, goldfinch, and chipping sparrow.

Kind of a fun experiment, and the app really does what it says it will!  If it works that well on my front porch with cars driving by and making lots of background noise, I'm looking forward to taking it someplace quiet.