BirdsEye, a new app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, is being released today. It will show you the locations of bird sightings in your area -- as soon as they're posted to eBird. BirdsEye pairs reports from eBird with photos from VIREO, audio from Cornell's Macaulay Library, and text from Contributing Editor Kenn Kaufman (right).
Read my description of the BirdsEye app.
If you have iTunes on your computer, here's how to find BirdsEye on the App Store.
We all know Kenn. He writes our "ID Tips" column, and he's the author of Field Guide to Birds of North America as well as guides to butterflies, insects, and mammals. His books also include Kingbird Highway, A Field Guide to Advanced Birding, Lives of North American Birds, and Flights Against the Sunset. He's also the co-creator of a really nice birding blog.
But who knew he was into electronic gear? In late October, I spoke with him about why he became involved with BirdsEye, the work he did for the app, and why he thinks it's worthwhile. --M.M.
Everyone knows you as an author of field guides and other books. How did you get involved with creating an app for the iPhone?
I got involved because one of the principal people doing this project is an old friend of mine. Pete Myers was one of the three guys running the project. He’s been a friend of mine since the mid-1980s. We were both working for the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia at the same time, and then he went on to National Audubon. There was a period when I was the associate editor of American Birds magazine, back when Audubon was publishing that, and Pete was the Vice President for Science at Audubon.
So I got to go out in the field with him frequently. He’s one of these scary intelligent people. [Laughs] Sort of existing at a higher plane and, you know, just frighteningly intelligent but also a really nice guy, fun and down to earth. And a very keen birder, very skilled birder. He did his master’s degree on shorebirds. He studied shorebirds at Barrow [Alaska] and on the coast of Argentina on their wintering grounds; he did a lot of work with Sanderlings. So anyway, he’s done a lot over the years. He left Audubon a number of years ago, and he’s been doing independent scholar stuff.
But I’ve stayed in touch with him loosely because he continues to have birding as one of his major interests. And he called me up out of the blue last spring to say that he and two friends had this idea for an iPhone app. At first I was not too interested because I assumed it was going to be some sort of field guide. I knew there were all sorts of people working on electronic field guides for iPhones, and I thought jumping in to be involved with one more wasn’t high on my list of things to do. But he told me that his partners, Todd Koym and Carl Coryell-Martin, were geniuses at programming. When Pete Myers calls someone a genius, you know, you pay attention. Then he told me that it was going to tap into eBird and it was going to be a birdfinding app. That caught my attention because it was obvious that there was huge potential for this and that there was nothing else like it out there.
Yeah, that certainly seems to be true. Do you have an iPhone?
Actually, no, I don’t, not yet. Do you have one?
Yeah, just a few months ago I got one.
I have an iPod Touch, so I was able to download these different builds [of BirdsEye] onto it. It’ll work for that, too, although having it on the iPhone would give it more capabilities. I’m about to break down and get an iPhone just because so many of my friends have them.
That’s kind of how I felt. Do you know a lot of birders who are using iPhones or other smartphones in the field, or using those electronic field guides?
I know quite a few birders now who have iPhones. And some of them have used some of the electronic field guides more as a curiosity than anything else. It’s fun to mess around with those things. It’s one of those things that I assume is going to increase in popularity, just like a few years ago, the idea of doing anything on the Internet was a novelty.
Read Laura Kammermeier's article about birding with the iPhone.
Right. We all know where that’s gone. So tell me about your role with BirdsEye. What was it that you did for it?
When Pete first got in touch, it wasn’t evident right at the start how I could be useful to the project. Pete wanted to talk about it to get my reactions and see what I thought of the plan. And I thought it sounded interesting enough that I wanted to be involved somehow if I could. They already had the idea of having this tap into eBird, and they were pretty far along in figuring out how that could work. And they had already figured that they would have photographs of the birds in there, too, not necessarily for identification but just as a reminder of what the thing looks like. And what it sounds like, because they had also decided they were going to get bird sounds from Cornell put in the app. And I pointed out that the one big thing that was missing was information on what to do once you get to the spot where the bird is.
The way the app is set up, it will get you to eBird hotspots where the bird has been reported recently. So, okay, you’re going to go look for your very first Winter Wren. You don’t know much about it, and it’s been reported from this park. You go the park, and there’s the baseball diamonds, and there’s the pond, and the grove of pine trees with no undergrowth, and the thick woods. Where do you look for the Winter Wren? So I said, “What you need here is something that gives people information about where to look for the bird once they get to the right spot.” Just being in the right place, even knowing that you’re within a couple of hundred yards of where the bird might be, isn’t much help if you don’t have a sense of its behavior, of its habitat, and so on.
So I wrote these paragraphs for each bird. All 847 species that are in the thing. I wrote this short paragraph [for each bird] as if I were talking to a friend who was going to look for the bird for the first time. And just giving them advice on where to look for it and how. You know, will there be flocks of them sitting in the tops of trees, or will there be just one lurking in the bushes, or will it be walking along the edge of the water? That sort of thing. It’s advice for the person who is hoping to go see this bird for the first time.
That certainly stands out in the app. It’s not trying to be a field guide, but it’s definitely designed to get you to the bird. To me, that carries through when I look at it.
I hope so. That’s one of those points that’s hard to get across. You know I did a book more than 10 years ago now called Lives of North American Birds...
Oh sure, I have it on my desk.
Oh, wow, thanks, I appreciate that. Well, that book has a third of a million words in it, and it’s all about the behavior of the birds and their life histories, and so on. And I’ve actually had people tell me, “Well, I don’t find this very useful for identification because the pictures aren’t that good.” [Laughs.] It’s hard to get the point across that identification is not the only thing. And it’s definitely not the point of this app.
I’m sort of going off on a tangent here, but I think the choice of pictures is beautiful. The photos came from VIREO. I’m biased, but I think they were really well chosen.
Yeah, I think you’re right. Who selected the photos?
Susan Roney Drennan, a past editor of American Birds [and author of Where to Find Birds in New York State], had a lot to do with editing and checking the photos and doing the trims of them for what the thumbnails would look like, checking the IDs of the pictures, and so on. I like the fact that you can rotate the phone on its side and the picture will rotate, too. So for the horizontal pictures, you get a larger size that way.
And you wrote all the text for it. Was it all new text, or did you borrow from your books?
These days it’s hard to write anything that’s brand new. What can you say about Field Sparrow that hasn’t been said before? Part of the time, I had my field guide [Field Guide to Birds of North America] or I had Lives open on the desk, and I would glance through a family of birds before I started writing. And I would try to write stuff off the top of my head. And then I would glance at my other books to make sure I hadn’t just repeated the same thing verbatim. So it was more a matter of checking to make sure I wasn’t saying exactly the same thing, rather than copying.
Is the process of writing such short paragraphs, what’s that like compared to what you do for us or other writing? Is it similar?
Most of the writing that I have done for the last 12 to 15 years has been for a specific format. With the field guides, I was writing the text directly into the page layouts, so I could see exactly what was going to fit and what wasn’t. With the column for Birder’s World, there’s only a certain amount of space there. We’ve got the five photos per column with a caption for each one. And the caption has to be within a range. It can’t be too few words or too many. And likewise for the main text for the column. So that’s good practice in trying to write to a specific length.
Between the field guide work and the column, I’ve had a lot of practice on [writing to a] specific word count.
One of Todd’s updates to the app said you had updated the text for a number of the birds. Was that to make them shorter to fit on the screen?
No, actually, it was to make some of them longer. I started writing text back in May 2009 and finished it in July. At that point, the final format hadn’t been settled on. It’s amazing to watch how this thing has evolved over time. We were still messing around with a lot of basic things about the format. So I didn’t know actually how much space there was going to be for some of the rare birds. I initially didn’t know for sure that a whole page would come up for each species. For some of the rarities and introduced, escaped, and exotic birds, I thought it might just be a very short space on the page.
So, as an example, for Pechora Pipit, I wrote one short sentence about it. Probably the same with some Old World warblers or buntings, where the initial text was just a sentence because I thought there might not be room for more. When it became clear that the format would allow an entire page with the picture and so on, it looked pretty sparse just having the one sentence. So I asked the guys if I could go back in and expand the text for some of those. It was about 97 species that I wound up expanding the text for.
That’ll be of interest mainly to the more serious birders who might be going off to chase something like that. If there’s been a report of a Siberian Accentor, and you’re going to go look for the Siberian Accentor, then there’s a little bit more information on the bird and what it might be doing.
Have you heard if people are anticipating BirdsEye and if they’re looking forward to it?
There are certainly some people who are aware of it and, hopefully, looking forward to it. I’ve seen some figures on the growth in use of iPhones, and it’s pretty impressive. The availability of the various apps probably helps to drive that, too. People will say, “Well, I’ve already got a cell phone.” But as more and more things become available that look like they might be useful, then more people see a reason to go ahead and get one.
To me, one of the things that’s exciting about BirdsEye is it really highlights eBird and its usefulness. I report to eBird, but it’s great having this capability to go into it just to see what’s around. On the opening page it lists things like, “Find nearby birds, locate a bird, view birding hotspots,” sort of as a table of contents. I can look up my nearby town of Port Clinton, Ohio, and see everything that’s been reported in the last few weeks. Sandhill Crane, well, where was that seen? I can pull it up and see all these pinpoints showing spots nearby here in Ontario and Michigan and northwest Ohio where Sandhill Crane’s been seen recently. And I’m thinking, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” I’m talking to people every day, and I’m online, and I thought I was keeping tabs on what was around. But here are all these reports I wasn’t aware of.
And, of course, participation in eBird has been increasing exponentially within the last couple of years. With more and more people reporting, there’s more information in there. It’s like a feedback loop that’s self-perpetuating. With more information in there, it’s more inspiring for people to take part and send in their own observations and get the benefit of it.
Could BirdsEye be helpful for people doing conservation work, especially when it comes to finding out where birds are in real time?
I think it certainly could be. If you’re talking about birds that are sedentary with really restricted ranges, say if someone’s working on California Gnatcatcher, BirdsEye won’t tell them anything about its distribution that they didn’t already know. It might tell them about where people are going to look for them.
But then consider a bird like Rusty Blackbird, where there’s been a lot of concern about its status, but there’s not a huge amount of information. Rusty Blackbird occurs over a pretty wide range, it migrates through much of the east, and it shows up as a stray farther west. And being able to go into BirdsEye and just quickly see where Rusty Blackbird’s been found recently, I think that could be useful for conservation professionals.
Who is BirdsEye primarily for?
One of the things that I really like is that it’s got value for people at all different levels of birding experience. In terms of projects on paper, right now I’m revising my old Field Guide to Advanced Birding, which has value for experienced birders, but I wouldn’t give it to a beginner. My field guide, on the other hand, is more aimed at newcomers than at advanced birders. It’s hard to do something that works for all levels when you’re talking about books.
With this app, I can see it working in a completely different way for an experienced birder than it does for someone who’s a beginner. If you’re new to birding, you can go into this thing and immediately see what’s been found in your area. It narrows it down: you’re not thinking about 800-plus kinds of birds, you’re thinking about 50 or 80 or 100 that have been seen in this immediate area recently. And so it’s great for focusing on what’s there. The function of actually getting people to the bird, I think, would be tremendously useful for someone who’s a beginner. They could say, “Okay, I’ve never seen a Red-bellied Woodpecker, but according to this app, I could find a Red-bellied Woodpecker in this park that’s only 10 miles away.” And they’d go see it. Hopefully, it would make the birding experience much more productive.
Even someone who’s been birding for years, like me — I’ve been birding since I was six years old. But I still find it fascinating to go in there and see what’s been reported at these different hotspots. So I think it’s got something to offer to birders at every level of experience. And I’m thrilled to have a chance to be involved in a project that can do that sort of thing.
You know I was looking at it earlier today [October 30] for sightings in the Milwaukee area, and Northern Goshawk was reported in a couple of places. I sat up in my chair when I saw that! So you’re right: I think it works for anybody, no matter what kind of experience they’ve had with birding.
Yeah, and as an aside, I think it’s going to be a good goshawk year! Anyway, thanks very much, I’m pleased that you think BirdEye is interesting enough to be worth talking about.
Absolutely, thanks for your time, Kenn.
You bet.
Read my article describing BirdsEye.
Read about the December 2009 issue of Birder's World magazine.
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