I've been birdspotting for the last year (in the UK, there is an addictive app called birdex, which is basically like a pokedex in the pokemon game, except it does birds). I am proud to report that I've observed 110 species this year. The last one was this weekend, where apparently meadow pipits are traveling across London parks while they're heading south.<p>It's not just regional dialects and individual birds, I am noticing that the time of the year also matters. Tits sound different in spring, summer and autumn, and so do e.g. robins.<p>It's a hobby I can recommend to everyone. Whenever I am outside now, I can listen for any faint sound and then make a mental note of all the birds I observed.
We used yellowhammer dialects as one of the tasks in the OG paper on building 'custom' models for species classification on top of embeddings from bird song classifiers:
<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-49989-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-49989-z</a><p>It was the hardest task (alongside godwit call types, bat species (pitch shifted into the audible range), Marine mammal species, and frog species), but still worked!
I really appreciate seeing more ethology stories on HN!
I didn't grow up near ravens but I'm sure I've encountered them in my life plenty of times, except now I'm traveling around Oregon/Washington forests and I can't tell you how many times I thought some drunk people were arguing or screaming in camp and it was just the ravens. Just the strangest screeching or whatever you want to call it.<p>Actually, thinking about this, I was in Moab for a year with ravens and never heard anything like what I hear in the PNW from them.<p>Also didn't know Stellar Jays were a thing until here, coolest looking bird I've seen. Like punk rock blue jays.<p>Gemini has been absolutely <i>terrible</i> as a "what bird? [bird pic]" tool. I wonder how many bird names I've "learned" wrong from it. It thinks a lot of what I send it are canada geese.
Try an app called Merlin, from Cornell University. It's excellent, and basically runs against a regional machine learning model to identify birds.
Use seek to identify plants/animals
ofa coursa birds have-a accents!
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