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.

The very first bird my PUC claimed to identify was a Mallard Duck. That’s unlikely, but not impossible. There’s a pond not far from my house with ducks, but they don’t usually leave the park where the pond is. When I listened to the recording, there was no bird. Just a car driving by. That’s a huge miss. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to tell the device that it’s wrong. The only solution I could find online was “email the company,” and that is more work than I want to do for something that barely reaches the level of “hobby” for me.