I recently download an app that uses AI to identify bird calls.
Merlin Bird ID
Merlin is amazing. I heard birds outside my new apartment and thought of them as nice background noise. Within days of installing Merlin, I could tell sparrows, cardinals and robins apart without seeing them. Whenever I heard a new bird, I’d grab my phone and open Merlin.
One day it sounded like a robin and a cardinal were having and argument while both simultaneously having a stroke. Merlin figured out it was a catbird, a relative of the mockingbird that learns the songs of other birds then strings pieces of them together in a disorganized song to impress the ladies. Basically, the male catbird who can sing the weirdest songs using the most species signals that he has “been around” for enough seasons to learn all those songs and therefore must have good genes the females want to pass on. It’s mind blowing to learn all this about things that are going on outside your window.
I’ve been wanting to give this a try. It uses the same AI as Merlin but runs on a raspberryPI.
Pretty sure this thread exists because of Merlin. Half the people I know seem to be on it
I love how birds are named. Look Debbie, it’s a Coloredpart Sounditmakes.
Oddly enough, other than the “part” thing, the Grey go-away-bird follows that formula. Not so much with the sad flycatcher (who’ll be alright, he just needs to process it all), the little bustard or the drab seedeater , who was clearly named by a dude who hates birds 😂
“Drab Seedeater” really was named by an ornithologist who was just god damned done that day, huh?
Absolutely 😂
Ah yes, the brownringed squarker.
You can rest assured that they’ve been watching you for your entire life.
The neighbours hand raised this abandoned baby starling a few years ago, so it had decided everyone in the neighbourhood was his best friend too, and used to visit me, sit on top of my head and sing, demand bugs and berries, and tease our dog. It got so I could pick its voice out in the tree, and would come and sit on the kitchen window and yell at us to come outside.
Hello fellow big featherless birds!
So Lemmy believes in birds?
I can’t believe they fell for it. Birds are not real.
Birds aren’t real.
I know it’s the entire point, and “lol u mad,” etc., but boy do I hate this meme.
Wait till the “shoes fell off” meme hits lemmy
What can I say? I am a creature of the interwebs. BTW, I saw someone wearing this on a T shirt recently.
I don’t begrudge anybody taking weird stances for the troll of it… But i think back to how the flat earth movement started out the same way. Now it’s populated with a bunch of psychos killing themselves in homemade rockets, talking about how nasa is a conspiracy…
“The hole in the soul.” Plenty of people have a need to escape reality. Some people look to drugs or alcohol or sex or gambling. Others find their happiness in a belief that makes them smarter and braver than anyone else.
Yeah, exactly. This is why I get annoyed when people say it’s “harmless fun” when talking about homeopathy, or astrology or whatever. All pseudoscience is dangerous to society for the exact reason you just laid out. It promotes magical thinking over critical thinking, and next thing you know, you’ve got people buying 100% into shit that has been continuously disproven over and over for hundreds of years.
Every adult human should be required to read, A Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. He does a much better job than I ever could at explaining why this is an issue.
The “Invisible Dragon in my Garage” is one of my favorite essays in the book, and played a huge role in influencing how I went about questioning, and ultimately leaving, the faith I was raised in. You can find the entirety of that essay if you search his name and the title of the essay. It’s not very long, but boy did he have a way of putting things into words that could just make things click.
Ooh, I haven’t read that book in like 20 years, I should dust it off again.
what kind of mad being puts tweets on a tshirt
I only report, I don’t judge
Do they know it though?
They’re all like “humans aren’t a real thing anyway”…
Sometimes when you look at pigeons they look back
How dare they! I gave grain to their fucking mothers!
No shit. This happened to me this year. A bird crossed my path while I was running and I had to double take because it was so cool looking. Now I look forward because I see him pretty often now. Ever since I check birds out all the time now
“Look Raymond, a yellow crested warbler”
No you’re too excited the warbler’s a common bird.
It may be common, but it’s still a bird
Acquiring birds.
Quack
Go, unreasonably buff bird!
Ahh, the majestic space duck.
My grandma got me into birding when I was a young child. My friends always text me pictures of birds like it’s a quiz. Maybe this means they’ll start to catch up.
I got into birding this spring as a hobby, thinking to myself “it’s free, you just need to use your eyes and ears”, withing a month I bought a $350 pair of binoculars. I’ve managed to fight off the temptation of a decent camera so far, thankfully. I found a great park at the tail end of spring migration about 10 minutes from my apartment, and the dawn chorus was almost sensory overload, the was so many different species singing and calling. I’m looking forward to what new birds I’ll see during this fall migration and especially next spring migration.
I’m incapable of picking a cheap hobby. But this might be the healthiest. Gets you out and about, and birders are so nice and friendly. Even started planning holidays around it.
The latest gen mirrorless cameras are great for birding. Light enough to be handholdable, and subject detection is great.
My wife got me birds of Europe last year because I once mentioned it’s a neat book (my parents have it). Next thing I know I buy some binoculars for birdwatching and started tracking the birds that visit my garden. It’s not a spectacular list but I am proud of it because I used the book to identify the birds and got it confirmed with birdnet. The list: house sparrow, blackbird, goldfinch, swift, common house martin, common linnet, greenfinch and blue tits. Edit: and wood doves
I love this list! OP, go out hiking in the spring and see some more. It’s incredible to experience.
I really regret opening Lemmy after staring at a procession of magpies hopping past my window now.
They know
That is exactly me with plants over the pandemic. Natives are cool as shit.
Oooh love native plants.
Plane watching is basically birdwatching for nerds.
I’m close to YUL and often check flightradar24 ☺️
I live under SFO and wrote an Alexa app where I can ask what plane that is, and it tells me the plane and where it came from
Can I have it?
No
Pretty much
I recently found out that a monthly pass on my city’s transit system, which I have, is exempt from the extra charge when going to the airport (YVR), so hell yeah I’m taking advantage of that! They have two really cool observation areas outside security where you can see the gates and runway.
