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.

Double Dutch Chocolate Bundt Cake (from Mom's Recipe Card File)

This has to be my favorite chocolate cake recipe of all time.  It's rich and moist, but not cloying.  It's fantastic with vanilla ice cream.  It's really EASY!!!  

This is an "old" recipe from the late 1960s or early 1970s.  My version uses ready-to-spread frosting, which when we first made this recipe wasn't a thing!  We had to buy a boxed frosting MIX (how convenient!) and make it before starting the cake.

It's called Double Dutch because either the cake mix or the frosting mix was called Double Dutch.  You can't find it anymore, so I get as close as possible with fudge and dark chocolate.  Make sure you use a good quality non-stick Bundt pan (Nordic Ware and Wilton both make good ones, but I prefer Nordic Ware).

Double Dutch Chocolate Bundt Cake

1 package dark chocolate or fudge cake mix

1 can dark chocolate or fudge ready-to-spread frosting (divided)

3 eggs

1 1/3 c water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Mix together cake mix, 1 cup of the frosting, eggs, and water.  Bake in a sprayed Bundt pan for 50 to 60 minutes.  Cool 15 minutes, then remove from the pan.  Add a little water to the remaining frosting and mix to make a glaze.  Drizzle glaze over the cake.

The Mid-Summer Yard and Garden Tour - Something's Growing!

I've spent a LOT of time outside this past week, cleaning up the mess from the recent storms.

Besides the major tree damage to our buckeye and the neighbors' maple last week, some good-sized branches broke off and fell out of the top of the 95-foot tulip poplar in the back yard.  The tree guys didn't mess with them because the branches didn't fall on the neighbors' house, which was why we called them and their giant claw machine. 

I went out and dragged the branches to a relatively convenient spot to cut them up.  We have two gas-powered chainsaws, but they're difficult to start and to keep running (even That Man has to work hard at it).  They make oily messes and are LOUD to boot, so I made the executive decision to buy an electric chainsaw so I could cut up those limbs without a lot of wasted effort.  It's been too hot to suffer that way.  The new saw is easy to start, relatively quiet, and went through the fresh wood like butter.  Because the chainsaw doesn't belch smoke and fumes, I could smell the wood as I cut.  Tulip poplar is super fragrant!

All tulip tree stuff.  Under the rack is a
pile of tulip poplar seeds. Dry, they
make great tinder for starting a fire!

About a week before the storm, I'd taken delivery of a nice new EMPTY firewood rack.  Well, it's not empty anymore. That Man says that's what caused the storm to knock down the trees - nature abhors a vacuum, and the wood rack needed something to fill it up.  My new chainsaw and I obliged.

I heard the storm that caused all the damage may have actually been a tornado that didn't touch down.  I saw the trees on the street behind us blowing in all directions rather than just one, and our buckeye tree appeared to have been twisted when it broke.  The tree guys took it down to the ground and hauled it away with the neighbors' big maple tree, so we didn't get any of its wood.  Poor tree.  We'll miss it.

Here's what a Nut Weasel looks like.

Buckeye trees are notorious for their fertility.  Every year they produce thousands of buckeyes that litter the ground and make it difficult to walk - kind of like walking on a carpet of golf balls.  We used to pay The Girl and The Boy five cents a buckeye to pick them up.  They'd usually fill up a couple of five-gallon buckets each at about $40.00 a bucket.  That's a lot of buckeyes! 

Since there aren't any kids to bribe to gather buckeyes anymore, I looked for a tool to make gathering them easier.  I'd decided to buy a Nut Weasel for this fall, but now it's moot - I don't need it.

Possibly the last living
connection to our buckeye tree.

It's not just the buckeyes themselves that are problematic, but the little seedlings they make!!!  In the spring, there'd be a sea of baby buckeye trees.  The ones in the yard were easy to take care of - you just kept mowing the grass regularly and eventually they give up, but there would always be a bunch hiding in the beds of peonies and daylilies along the side of the house.  I must have done a thorough job of eradicating the stray seedlings that usually crop up in the flower beds because there just aren't any to be found there.  HOWEVER...!  I discovered ONE in the grass under the tulip tree.  It's apparently the only remaining offspring of our late lamented tree.

So...  I've decided to dig it up and move it to the garden, and maybe one day we'll have a sapling to plant in the yard, and it will grow up and make thousands of buckeyes of its own.  THEN I'll buy myself a Nut Weasel!

An Instant Pot Experiment - Hard-Cooked Eggs!

I've been using my Instant Pot for a while now, but I'm no expert!  I do ribs, roast beef, chicken breasts - nothing exciting but I have several things I want to try, so I keep experimenting.

One of the first things many people try is hard-cooked eggs.  They say it's fast, brainless, consistent, and the eggs are always easy to peel.  Boiling eggs on the stove always worked fine for me - until I started buying super-fresh organic eggs from my church's chickens.

There are several tricks to make sure they peel relatively easily, but what a pain to jump through those stupid hoops, and which ones to use?  Don't try to hard-cook them until they're at least 3 or 4 weeks old; add salt to the water; add baking soda to the water; add vinegar to the water; bring the water to a boil before putting the eggs in;  put the eggs in the water before heating it up.  It's enough to drive you nuts!!!

An experiment was in order!

I got out the Instant Pot and six eggs - three white jumbo, and three brown of assorted sizes.  According to many sites on the internet, the standard method for hard cooking eggs in the Instant Pot is 5-5-5, which means you set the pot to cook at pressure for 5 minutes, let the pressure release naturally for 5 minutes, then open the pressure valve to release the rest of the pressure, remove the eggs and place them in ice water for 5 minutes.

That was what I'd INTENDED to do, but I got distracted during the second 5 - the natural pressure release - and so it ended up as 9 minutes instead.  Well, I keep my refrigerator just above freezing because I like my drinks COLD and I want to keep the food in there fresh as long as possible, so I figured I didn't goof up too much.

When I opened the IP, one of the organic brown eggs had cracked, but unlike a cracked egg in boiling water, the white hadn't oozed out and made an ugly egg.  Rather, the egg was still egg-shaped, but with just a little ridge where the shell had cracked, and half of the shell slipped off when I put it into the ice water bath.

After 5 minutes in the ice water, I pulled out one of each kind of egg and peeled them - perfectly!  No special procedures - just cracked them, rolled them on the counter, and peeled from the larger end.  The brown egg peeled as cleanly as the white egg.

But did I overcook them?  Here's the picture - perfection!  I guess I'm ready to make deviled eggs - YUM!!!

Notice how yellow the organic egg
yolk is compared to the white egg's!

So here's the official procedure:

Hard-Cooked Eggs in the Instant Pot (Basic 5-5-5 Method)

Eggs (whatever number you want to cook)

Water (the minimum amount required by your Instant Pot - 1 1/2 c for a 6-quart, 2 c for an 8-quart)

Pour the water into the inner pot.  Place a trivet or steamer basket inside the inner pot.  Stack the eggs on the trivet or in the steamer basket.  Close the lid, set the pressure release valve to sealing.  

Press the Pressure Cook button, making sure the pressure is set to "High."  Set the cook time to 5 minutes.  The Instant Pot will beep and start heating up.  Prepare an ice water bath for cooling the eggs after they have finished cooking.  When it gets up to pressure, the Instant Pot will beep again and start counting down.  

When the cooking time is finished, the Instant Pot will beep again and start counting up.  When it reaches 5 minutes, turn the pressure release valve to "Venting."  When the pressure has completely released, open the Instant Pot lid, remove the eggs and put them in the ice bath for 5 minutes.