The application of Apps in Wildlife Watching

 I am of the generation that saw the common use of mobile phones during my late teens. Back then they were simple brick-like affairs with just call and test functions, far removed from the pocket computers we have today. I am by no means a Luddite I am drafting this blog on a Remarkable (TM) tablet but wildlife watching has always been a getaway from technology. I use tech of course, what birder doesn't? , my binoculars, my camera, my Garmin GPS device for plotting trees, and my digital thermometer/anemometer but I had always avoided the application of apps.

This month however I have discovered two apps that I have found easy to work into my survey routine. 

First off is the Mammal Mapper by the Mammal Society. I must admit I have been using this app for a little while to log mammal sightings but I haven't been using it to its full potential. My increased use of the app came from my desire to submit more of my sightings to the Mammal Society national database. In the past, I had used its individual sighting mode which is simple to use and very intuitive. This month I have used it in survey mode and it was amazing.  

I used it on my own patch of course, where else would I test it? The app allows you to continuously track your movements on a map as you walk about. Whenever you spot a mammal you log a sighting by pressing the record button. The record button allows you to add photographs and record notes. You can also record mammals based on their tracks and signs and dead individuals. At the end of your walk, you press submit and this generates a map of where you walked highlighting each sighting. It also states the time taken and the distance traveled. 

The app is so easy to use and creates a great record of all your mammal sightings and the distance and length of your visits. Its greatest benefit is the fact that the information is logged directly with the Mammal Society. Of course, there is an inherent bias in this system, small rodents are likely to be under-reported, and most species are nocturnal and hard to spot but the facility to record mammal signs and record individual sightings makes this a powerful tool for the society to monitor mammal populations.

The second app I have started to use is the Merlin Bird App from Cornell University. I am normally a traditional birder and make field notes of birds whose identities I am unsure of rather than carry a bird book with me. I always do my checks at home late with my good bird books. I used to carry a book as a teenager but I was once told that a good birder never takes one with him, an element of birding snobbery that has stuck with me. So was not the visual ID tools that I was most interested in. 

The power of this app is instead its bird song and call identification. I am not the greatest at identifying birds from their song, I have learned the basics and I know most of the birds on my patch but I am still getting the hang of some, the warbler for instance. I have tried to improve and used  CD's and cassettes in the past but it never really stuck, for me, I think I need to associate the sound with actually seeing the bird a kind of visual tag to attach to the audio. 

Merlin isn't the only app out there for this I have used a few other apps before this one and find most to be lacking in one key area, accurate identification. The Merlin App bowled me over the first time I used it on my iPhone. Cornell is an American university and so I had to download the Britain and Ireland datasets but this was very easy and took up very little space, my other option was to download the birds of the Western Palearctic, but as I don't travel I think the local set will work fine. 

I have only used the bird song function and it is great. You click on the record button and the app will display a sonogram in real-time very much like some bat detectors. Beneath the sonogram, it will generate its estimation of the species and create a list of all being heard and highlights each one as they call.

 I have used it for several hours and not once did it misidentify a bird, an accuracy rate second to none. It helped me locate species on the survey I had missed. At one point a background call, which I would normally have ignored as too obscure, revealed itself to be a Goldcrest, honing in on the sound I was able to see it and confirm its presence.  

This isn't an app that I will use on every visit nor will I record a full survey, although this is eminently possible, all be it risking using up all my memory storage. I will use it to help train myself and on unknown or suspect birds. It will help tighten me up on my neverending battle to accurately identify Marsh Tits and all Willow Tits and will give me a better handle on Willow Warblers in the summer. 

Like all good apps these are tools to help, not take over your visits. It would be able to record a whole visit and not look up and around at all and still have a fairly good species list at the end, all be it lacking in the less vocal residents. 

Technology should augment our enjoyment and not steal the fun from it and these two apps certainly do that. On my Mammal Mapper survey, I was hyper-focused on mammal signs checking every footprint and examing every burrow whilst the Merlin app opened up the world of sound to me and encouraged me to be a better birder.