BirdWeather

While certainly not 100% accurate all of the time, I’ve found my PUC to be relatively comparable to Merlin when I’ve run the two apps at the same time. As a matter of fact, there’ve been several instances where Merlin misidentified a bird song that the PUC either accurately reported or didn’t identify at all. And, I appreciate the scoring & probabilities associated with the songs/calls identified especially if I don’t get a visual on the bird(s) in question. I consider this relatively new technology and am assuming as time passes it will improve (similar to Merlin, which everyone used to grumble about). I went out to Cornell Labs bioacoustical website to read about the technology (& several of the papers associated with the BirdNet/BirdWeather bioacoustics) and found them helpful in better understanding the results presented in the BirdWeather app, the datasets they rely upon to identify birds (Xeno/Canto, etc) and the difficulties associated with identifying birds by sound. It gave me a better appreciation for the complexities involved in bio-acoustical analysis of sounds & the data I was seeing (& not seeing) on the BirdWeather app. As for the PUC itself, I found it relatively user friendly & rather intuitive (plus it helped to read the “Frequently Asked Questions” section on the BirdWeather website). As a matter of fact, I’m impressed enough with this whole setup that I’ve already ordered another PUC…this time the BAT edition. I’m anticipating that the BAT PUC will provide a whole new realm of wonders present in our night skies - really, I think of these devices as exciting technology, perhaps still in its infancy, but certainly a worthwhile investment.

Set up initially on one iPhone, used the ID to access from another phone ok, but the process of entering an ID isn’t working on our iPads.