Technology has revolutionized birdwatching

24 May 2024

Like many old cranks, I’m resistant to change. I won’t even change a lightbulb. I just wish it would go back to the way it was.

Still, I must admit, recent changes in the world of birding have been remarkable.

My interest in birds began in first grade, yet I didn’t own binoculars until I was out of college. My eyesight was so keen, I could misidentify a bird hundreds of yards away. I don’t remember where or how I bought my first binoculars, but it was probably from a Sears catalog. Or possibly with Green Stamps.

Soon after I moved to Bangor in 1986, I bought a new pair. I still have them. When I peer through them today, I think, “Yuck. Did I really use these?”

Optics have come a long way. Even low-end binoculars are far superior to those of yesteryear. Improved glass quality, precision grinding and modern lens coatings produce clearer and brighter imagery than your grandfather’s hand-me-downs. Birding is now so popular that competition among global manufacturers is intense. Prices are lower than ever, adjusted for inflation.

Likewise, amateur bird photography was practically nonexistent in my youth. Cameras were heavy and slow-focusing. Film was expensive. You never knew if you got the shot you wanted until the prints came back from Kodak.

In 2007, Panasonic introduced its FZ camera series, launching a digital photography boom for birders.

My current camera is eight years old. Its automatic focus is awesomely good — quick and precise. It’s also obsolete. Today’s cameras can recognize the eye of a bird, and focus on it instantly for the perfect shot. They can shoot up to 60 photos in rapid succession, downloading them onto a memory card the size of my thumbnail. I took 1600 photos on a recent trip, and used only 20 percent of the card’s capacity.

I joined the Penobscot Valley Chapter of Maine Audubon 38 years ago. Back then, there was a rare bird alert recorded once weekly. When I wanted the latest update, I just dialed the number on my rotary phone, and the tape-recorded message would tell me what somebody spotted six days ago.

Then came email. Then listservs. Text alerts are now available. Rare bird alerts go out as fast as rare birds are sighted. Maine Audubon coordinates these alerts. If interested, you can sign up in its Google group.

Long before I owned binoculars, I owned a cherished copy of the “Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds.” I added new guides to my bookshelf over the years. I still have them, though they rarely leave the shelf. All that information now fits in my pocket on my smartphone app.

When I was a teen, I started keeping a list of birds I had seen in my lifetime, checking them off in that same Peterson Field Guide. Fearful of losing the life list (which I eventually did anyway), I later started keeping track on a spreadsheet. Nowadays, eBird does it all for me.

In 2002, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology launched eBird — a free online database of bird sightings that anybody can join. It keeps track of all the sightings that birders submit, and aggregates the data for science.

During my travels in Arizona earlier this month, I submitted 58 checklists from my smartphone. Now, eBird will remember everything I saw and every place I saw it. If I return, eBird can even tell me what I missed, and where to find it.

Even better, eBird automatically keeps track of ongoing changes to taxonomy and nomenclature. Ornithologists are constantly splitting certain species, and lumping others together. To update my life list, I don’t have to do a thing.

I give full credit to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for revolutionizing modern birding. Its Merlin app makes bird identification accessible to even the most novice birder, by both sight and sound. It’s free and downloadable to a smartphone. It doesn’t always identify bird songs perfectly — even the birds don’t always sing their songs perfectly — but it’s getting better every day.

Merlin is even useful for experts. Sometimes, I turn it on just to see if I’m missing anything. I used it constantly during my recent Arizona trip to draw my attention to birds I’d never heard before.

With all these pocket-sized communication and identification tools, anybody can learn in far less time than the six decades it took me. I fully embrace the use of artificial intelligence. Relying solely on my natural intelligence was kinda slow.

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