How to become a budding ornithologist or at least recognize the bird that regularly chirps on your windowsill?
With the following five apps, it will be child's play.
To discover
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Birdnet
No less than 3,000 species of birds are recorded by this application which uses both artificial intelligence and neural networks to identify the sounds emitted by birds, across the four corners of the planet.
A “kind of Shazam” (a site that recognizes all the music played around you) for birdsong.
Once the application is opened, it records, using your smartphone's microphone, the sound of a robin, for example, or another rarer bird, and a visual graph is displayed for a few seconds later on your phone, allowing you to select the corresponding noise if several melodious sounds are identified at the same time.
The free application, developed by the ornithology laboratory of Cornell University (United States) and the Technological University of Chemnitz (Germany), recognizes the bird and provides additional information concerning it.
Available for free on iPhone, Android and in web version.
CuiCuiMatique
A bird song that you don't know?
CuiCuiMatique, a paid application, finds the answer simply when you press the red button displayed in the center of your smartphone screen and the recording starts.
After a few seconds of searching, the application displays several pieces of information: the name of the “artist”, his color photograph, as well as a soundtrack of his singing which can be heard more clearly and closely.
Apple Watch can also record sounds you want to know who made them later.
Available on iPhone.
Price: €3.99
Merlin Bird ID
Find the identity of the singer sitting on a branch using Merlin Bird ID.
The investigation will be carried out quickly.
After asking you a few questions, the application provides you with a list of birds corresponding to your answers on the screen of your smartphone.
Once the corresponding species is selected, you have access to other photos of the “suspect”, its description as well as other complementary sounds.
You can, if the bird is near you, photograph it and submit the photo, so that Merlin Bird ID will search its database (which has more than 40,0000 portraits from around the world) and identify it.
You can also add the location and date of the shooting for an even more precise result.
The free application produced by the Cornell ornithology laboratory (United States) also allows you to discover the other species present in the surrounding area and to listen, out of curiosity, to more than 20,000 different songs and calls.
It is available in different languages: French, Afrikaans, German, English, Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Danish, Spanish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Japanese, Malayalam, Marathi, Portuguese, Russian, Thai and Turkish.
Available for free on iPhone, Android and web version
Also readHow can I prevent birds from hitting the windows of my house?
Birds in pocket
“360 species of birds covering all of Europe.
More than 1000 photos.
337 sounds.
» Here is what the Birds in Pocket application offers.
Once the bird has been found, between one and four photographs of birds are displayed on the screen, to show the differences that may exist, depending on the species in question, between the female and the male or if the plumage is different depending on the species. season.
A descriptive sheet (order, family, size, weight, status, etc.) is accompanied, in the majority of sheets, by an audio track.
It is also possible to carry out a search based on different selection criteria (name, family, species).
An “Assistant” tab also allows you to select the shape of different parts of the bird's body (shape of the beak, neck, feet, crest, coat).
Available on iPhone, Android.
Price:
€4.99
Birdie Memory
Birdie Memory is an application that uses augmented reality for fun and educational purposes: learning to recognize birds and their songs from recordings from the British Library in London and the Natural History Museum in Berlin.
All you have to do is hover your smartphone in front of the image (from posters, books, postcards) which comes to life like a real bird.
In addition, it is possible, with the “Memory” mode, in the form of a quiz, to find which bird the song proposed by Birdie Memory belongs to.
There are twelve levels of progressive difficulty to become a true expert.
Available for free on iPhone, Android and in web version.