Haikubox

I have been a birdwatcher for decades and have built up a fair knowledge of the birds that come to my feeders. And I knew there were birds in the area that I never saw, but sometimes heard. The Haiku Box has proven that I knew only about 25% of the birds that can be heard from my yard and I am so excited to learn about the rest. I put up my box up in mid-April 2024 and it is now early June 2024. The box has identified nearly 100 species of birds that can be heard from my yard! I wasn’t sure what the range would be but I’m pleased to say it is hearing birds I know are multiple blocks away. The app has so many incredible features. I started by listening to the short recordings - those are made by my box, usually during the current day. Then I can compare what I hear with the clearly linked recordings available under “About” and “EBird”. I can click to see a bar graph of which days that bird has visited our area, on a circle graph that shows me times of day the bird is most active, and much more information. The app is well designed and almost completely intuitive. The only thing that didn’t make sense to me right off is the blue screen shown when you click on the button that looks like a collection of solid circles. It turns out that is a graph of the sound you hear in the recording and if I play the recording while looking at the graph, I can understand the components of the bird’s song. And if I click on the EBird button, the recordings available there via the “Listen” button have the same kinds of graphs. This has allowed me to start learning to separate out the songs of different birds as well as helping me learn the varieties of song that type of bird might sing. Given that it is spring, the birds are all very vocal and I’m learning so much! The HaikuBox is fairly expensive but it and the app are without a doubt my favorite purchase this year. I realize it isn’t 100% correct all the time, but it has such richness that there is something for every bird lover. I’ve been so excited about it that I’ve shown it to everyone I can!

This is a fabulous concept, but sadly it only seems to have about a 66% accuracy rate from what I can tell. Human birders need songsrepeated twice to be certain on an ID. This machine tends to only take a note or two and then take a stab at an identification. If only it were accurate with regard to some of the rare birds it claims to have been in or passed over my yard. This technology has a great promise if a little bit more time is allocated to ensure an accurate spectrograph is assigned to the correct bird. At this point, I cannot trust it for rare bird identifications and neither should you.

I’ve written before to Haikubox that it is much less reliable than recording through the Merlin ID app. Why? Because they are limiting the recordings to 3 seconds! That is not enough time to grab meaningful recordings or evaluate them afterwards. I don’t really know if they are evalutating longer stretches than 3 seconds, but if they are and not providing the option for those recordings, then they are failing their customers. I am looking forward to comparing with the soon-to-be-released Terra device.