Tech // Anne & Jim Ancona

A few weeks ago, Anne saw a blog post from Richard Hoeg, a Dartmouth classmate of mine and avid birder. Rich described his installation of a Haikubox, an automatic bird song ID system. It recognizes birds by their sound and displays the results on a website or in a mobile app. Rich’s site is here. Read his whole post if you want to find out more.

I was already familiar with the concept from Cornell’s Merlin app, which does something similar on your smartphone. If you hear a bird, you can bring up the app and it will listen and tell you what you’re hearing. It turns out that both the Merlin app and the Haikubox are based on a Cornell project called Birdnet. It’s an artificial neural network (AI software) that can recognize the sounds of over 6,000 bird species from all over the world.