Monthly Archives: April 2011

Monday Musings – Check Out BirdsEye

BirdsEye App

I know some of you might have thought the title was referring to the frozen vegetable brand but I meant an app that I am currently using on my iPhone. The app is called BirdsEye. As an emerging birder, I found this app to be worth every penny (yes, I paid the $19.99 for the full version). One of the things that makes this app so cool is that it is powered by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology ebird system. According to the ebird website, they utilize over 1 million bird sightings a month in compiling their data.

So you might be asking, how does BirdsEye help birders? Its pretty simple. BirdsEye makes this database available to us in an easy to navigate and use interface. There are 6 main features you can access thorough the main menu (In version 1.3, the current version).

1) Find Nearby Birds
2) Notable and Rare Bird Sightings
3) Locate a Bird
4) View Birding Hotspots
5) Select Birding Location
6) Update Life List

So far I have mostly used menu items 1, 2 and 4. The app uses the iPhones location detecting capabilities (if you turn them on) to pinpoint your location and find bird sightings collected through ebird in your vicinity. It does this all very quickly. I am actually shocked at how efficient the database access is on a 3G network.
I also love the ability to build a life list with all the species you have seen in person. What I haven’t decided is whether I will use the life list to be my portable photographic species list for birds.

There are 2 recommendations I would make to better the apps performance. First, when you select the directions portion of the mapping section, you proceed out of BirdsEye completely without any ability to re-enter the app without hitting the iPhone home key and reselecting the BirdsEye App. I find this annoying.
Second and most important to me, I would like the ability to see bird sightings closest to my location sorted by how recently they were seen. Lets face it, I see 2 basic ways to use this app, and one of them is to know the most recent sightings in and around your current location. The application does sort by species and then shows when the last time that species was seen so I assume the change I am requesting is not a big deal. The other way to use this app is to search for certain birds and have it show their sightings.

All in all, this app in combination with iBird Pro, makes for a really powerful mobile birding reference tool. I highly recommend it.

Note: Image courtesy of the BirdsEye website.

Killdeer at Sherwood Island State Park

Recently I visited Sherwood Island State Park. The Connecticut Ornithological Association (COA) maintains a listing of all bird sightings reported by members. The lists are emailed daily with an archive maintained on the site. If you have a chance to check the site out, I highly recommend it. It really is a great system.
One recent report had sightings of Short Eared Owls in the field behind the model airplane field so I ventured there to see what I could find.

Killdeer at Sunset

When I arrived at the park, I realized I made a rookie mistake. I didn’t check the tide tables. Unfortunately, it was low tied, and any shore birds were well outside the distance of my 600mm f/4.

Killdeer Pulling on Worm

So I headed over to the model airplane field and walked along the creek and around the bird feeders. There was a lot of bird activity. Unfortunately not great photo opportunities but some great birds none the less. There were two Osprey building a nest on a platform in the creek, the first Osprey I have seen in CT this year. There were a pair of Boat Tail Grackle in the trees hiding among the branches as well as Starlings and many Red Winged Blackbirds. Unfortunately none of them made for good images. The one exception was a few Killdeer that were feeding in this field.

Killdeer Sunset Profile

Have a great weekend!

Images captured by D3x, 600 VRII w/TCe 1.4II on Lexar UDMA digital film