Birding 2.0
Birding is in the midst of a revolution. Smartphone technology has brought powerful new tools for birders across the globe to help identify species and connect to a larger community. But it’s also allowed for public data gathering at a massive scale. And both scientists and the birds are benefitting from it.
EPISODE NOTES
There’s another way that smartphone technology has lead to advances in ornithology. Not thanks to software, but hardware.
In our seemingly endless obsession with getting phones thinner and lighter, a lot of money and talent was poured into miniaturizing components. The result is unbelievably small cameras, microphones… and accelerometers, gyroscopes and GPS trackers - the components in your phone that can help it judge location, movement and direction.
We use them for navigation and in fitness apps. But they opened ornithology to a new generation of trackers that could be affixed to small birds without harming them or inconveniencing their behaviour.
Among other things, this lead to the current world record holder for longest time in flight. Common swifts spend the couple months of their breeding season in Europe and Asia. But when they migrate to southern Africa for winter, some don’t stop flying for the whole time they’re down there. Trackers on the birds, only possible thanks to this miniaturization push, were able to prove conclusively that some common swifts stay airborne for 10 months straight, shattering the previous record.
TRANSCRIPT
Birding has had a heck of a century. Last time, we watched it go from violent diversion for the rich and quirky to eccentric hobby to respectable, increasingly popular passtime. An analog way to relax and reconnect with nature through serendipity and discovery.
But thanks to a new wave of technology, the birders who show up to Point Pelee these days are unlike any previous generation.
Of all the ways smartphones could change our lives, I’m not sure ‘revolutionizing birding’ was high on anyone’s list. But it’s a hobby that really benefits from having a camera, microphone and the internet in your pocket.
Forget big clunky field guides. Online databases can streamline identification - but you know what, forget them too! Now birders can tap into powerful machine learning algorithms from dedicated apps to identify based on a photo or live audio recording.
In fact while we’re at it, forget just wandering around nature. You can now locate birds with military precision. Plug in your target species, your location and maximum travel radius and let the app spit out up-to-the-minute corroborated data, down to pretty much the individual tree. Because those systems are connected to a global network of birders sharing their info.
And you may see this and think… something has been lost here. So much for the serendipity and romanticism of disappearing into nature, full of unknown possibility.
But ornithologists see it and think: this is a gold mine. They realize what they have, in effect, is an army of accidental volunteer researchers contributing a flood of data points.
So even pre-smartphones, back in 2002, The Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology team up to create: eBird. It’s a platform to help people track sightings and expand the birding community. But it also lets you add tot his massive bank of knowledge that scientists can draw from. And thanks to the boost that the Covid-19 pandemic gave birding, they’re at an all-time high for contributions.
They get around 100 million sightings annually, reaching 1 billion total in 2021 (the one billionth, FYI, was an australasian swamphen, reported by Heidi Krajewski).
And all that data has been put to work - in hundreds of publications and papers. For some specifically Canadian examples…
eBird was used in a 2020 study by the University of Manitoba to show that white-throated sparrow songs differ by region - and that those dialects can spread. Birds in Western Canada started singing an altered song, and it’s believed they taught it to birds from the rest of the country when they were all overwintering together. Now that new song has spread throughout Canada.
eBird helped lead to the protection of the Western Screech Owl. Observational data showed that the subspecies is largely confined to Vancouver Island and British Columbia’s south coast, which confirmed it as a threatened species.
Finally, eBird was used by the Rocky Mountain Naturalists Club to guide placement of nest boxes. By using eBird data to make a detailed map of waterfowl sightings, they could precisely cater the type and location of nest boxes to species’ favourite locations.
And that, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg. So yes, modern technology may have taken a bit of romanticism out of birding. But in its place is a much wider and more interconnected sense of community and a seemingly bottomless wealth of scientific data.