I highly recommend their free birding app for iOS. It's a great intro into brid identification and it's steps to finding a bird you just saw are simple and user friendly.
It has standard packs that are for common birds in the continental US, but also dozens of others for other regions all around the world that you can download for free. I've used it in Hawaii, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, and Portugal.
What a weird coincidence. I currently live in the city, where there is a stark absence of birds -- besides maybe coronavirus pigeons and gulls that will mug you down a dark alley -- but I'm from and work in the countryside, where I've established an acute awareness of the local bird life. I particularly like listening to bird song; I find it very relaxing. As recently as last week, I was thinking about compiling an Anki deck to help me learn to identify birds by sight and by their song. However, I was discouraged not so much by the quantity, but the subtleties in the differences (e.g., the aforementioned pigeons vs. wood pigeons: one has black stripes on their wing tips, but I don't remember which)... Seeing this, this morning on HN, re-encourages me to pursue ornithology as a hobby :)
No citation handy, but I came across a theory that the high levels of anxiety and stress and malaise prevalent in modern urban society is caused in part by the absence of birdsong. Consider our savannah ancestors, for whom the ambient sounds of birds constituted an "all is well" signal; cries of alarm and sudden flight served as an early warning system, and their silence could signal presence of a predator or other threat. It seems plausible to me that city-dwellers, at a primal level, "miss" these sounds in whose presence our systems of perception evolved, resulting in an imbalance and heightened baseline fear and anxiety.
Related tangent: "forest bathing" is a noteworthy remedy.
Keep your eyes open and I think you'll find there are far more kinds of birds in the city than one might first think. Once you get into the habit it can be very rewarding!
Cities tend to have a concentration effect on birds, especially during migrations. Central Park in NYC, for instance, is one of the best places in the world for birdwatching in spring and fall. Birds migrate at night, and at first light, gravitate to the first tree they can find. Since NYC is concrete for miles and miles, a very wide area's worth of birds all funnel into Central Park (and other parks, of course) and you get amazing quantities and varieties. The same is true for parks in other cities.
So don't worry about groups of species (like gulls or pigeons) and just learn to recognize them as a pigeon or gull. UNLESS you happen to see a lot of different kinds of those species.
You'll probably find a lot of house sparrows in your city... little brown birds. The males have a black bib. If you can find any sort of park in your city with trees or water, then you should be able to find a lot more birds. Water is also great for ducks.
I'm starting to get into birding. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good app to keep track of what birds you (and maybe others?) have seen? I'm thinking both for journaling / logging purposes so you know what you've seen before, and to know where good places to go are to see certain species.
eBird. It is the defacto site worldwide for logging bird sightings. It is free, the app is simple and powerful, and you are contributing to science every time you use it. (It is a product of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and they and other scientists around the world use the data heavily for many purposes). Also, it has lots of tools that help you learn the birds (and birders) in your area - localized histograms of sighting frequency, custom lists of birds you haven't reported yet, lists of nearby hotspots...
As far as identifying, get a field guide (Petersen's, Sibley's are good in the US). There are good forums with talented people helping if you submit pictures on reddit.com/r/whatsthisbird or on Facebook "What's this Bird?" group.
Ebird may have larger reach than any other but species sightings databases are usually mainly local / national. There are more records stored in these local databases than in Ebird. So I would answer, "it depends where you live".
Not a journaling/checklist kind of app but if you need help identifying a bird and can snap a picture of it there is an app called iNaturalist. It has a really good ID system, and if it can't give you any suggestions other people using the app will be able to suggest an ID. It's also not limited to birds.
Someone's already given the biggest answer (eBird), but a good supplementary app for help with identification is the Audubon app. You can do checklists in Audubon too, but eBird is better for that, plus has the bonus of submitting your lists for science.
I've been dabbling in amateur birdwatching for a few years now, it's honestly a lot of fun to be able to pick out local birds that I previously wouldn't have been able to put a name to: recently discovered that there are Grey Catbirds[0] in my area.
I wish Cornell's Ornithology lab exposed some kind of simple GET-only API, would love to be able to integrate it into some kind of chatbot to get people around me interested in the birds around them.
I can't really tell if this is what I'm looking for. I was hoping for something that simply cataloged information about birds like the Audubon does, i.e., I can go to the page for the Purple Sandpiper[0] and see information about that bird and hear its calls.
Regardless, I took a look at your project. It's very cool!
I'll also recommend another Android app, BirdNET [1]. This app does audio identification. and is jointly developed by a small team of EU researchers and Cornell. Covers 1,000+ species in North America and Europe. I've found that it does a remarkable job of identification even with crappy mobile phone microphones, and even in noisy environments. It ships off a recording to a server for analysis using neural nets trained on 2.5 million samples. I'm assuming that it's using Cornell's audio recordings, perhaps others. Times when I don't get a good match, it's best guess is often correct for birds that I know.
I've seen similar apps for iOS, but haven't tried any of them.
If you haven't taken up bird watching as a hobby, you should absolutely do it.
You know that feeling of playing runescape or minecraft or some other game and finding that one rare item? Birding is like that, except in real life.
I have audibly gasped many times when I've found a bird that I had never seen before.
Get a decent pair of binoculars (nikon aculon $70 is a good cheap starter pair) and take a relaxing stroll. Birds tend to like water and the edges of two habitats (fields and woods, marsh and fields, etc).
Part of the fun is using your ears and trying to track that darn bird down.
For me one interesting aspect was to watch my "hunter sense" wake up doing it - you start out and barely notice anything at all, you walk the woods and try to see some birds, but then with time it "wakes up", and even though you're not trying, you subconsciously "know" where some birds are, or that they are there. And as opposed to actual hunting everybody is still alive in the end, so win-win ;) (unless you're watching birds of prey of course)
I just got into birding more seriously in the last year, and I absolutely second this. I got a decent pair of binoculars that I keep around the house and on short walks [0], and a smaller pair of travel binoculars [1] that go pretty much everywhere, including my suitcase on trips. Every trip is a birdwatching trip now! It's so much fun to look for birds when you travel, because you're almost certainly going to see some that you've never seen before.
I did learn to stop spending so much time trying to identify each individual bird. It can be hard to positively identify closely-related species. For example, there are several species of woodpeckers where I live, and I used to try to identify one when I saw it. Then I just stopped thinking about that and started to really enjoy watching them when I see them. It's much more enjoyable, it's less rushed, and I'll get better at identifying them as I see them more often.
If you've never looked through some decent binoculars, it will amaze you. I did a lot of reading about binoculars before buying a pair. I had always heard things like 8x25, 8x42, etc. I went into it thinking bigger numbers are better, but of course that's not always true. The first number is magnification. I went with 8x, because higher magnifications can make the image too shaky unless you're using a tripod or leaning the binoculars against something. That magnification can also over-fill the viewing field, I believe. The second number is the size of the objective lens. Larger numbers mean brighter images, but they also mean bigger binoculars. As with many things, spending a few hundred dollars will get you a much nicer pair of binoculars than spending $50, but you won't get a whole lot more quality if you spend $1000. REI has a great, simple guide for choosing a pair. [2]
And to loop it back around to a video game if that's more in your comfort zone, there is Fantasy Birding where you pick a virtual location every day and are credited with seeing whatever real people really reported in that location that day.
Another good pair of binoculars to start with are those in the Celestron Nature DX family. About $100 for 8x42 or about $110 for 10x42.
These have a close focus distance of 2 m, as opposed to 5 m for the Nikon Aculon family.
Probably not a big deal for looking at birds while out on a stroll, but it could matter at home. I put food out on the rail of my deck and then have a nice parade of birds and squirrels visiting throughout the day, often much closer than 5m. For example, this squirrel [1] that was staring at me through the window--some seem to have learned that this might cause me to come out with peanuts.
I'm from southeast Alaska. We have a lot of interesting birds, but they tend to be fairly drab at this latitude. My favorite sighting happened on an early morning run in southwest Colorado. I was running down a mountain road at sunrise, and a western tanager was singing loudly from the very top of a tall pine. It was the most brilliant, beautiful bird I'd ever seen.
I've been into raptors for 25+ years, and at age 54 saw my first California condor. We were driving back from the North Rim and I saw this massive bird, then caught sight of the white underwing. Pulled the car over, into a couple small shrubs (I was excited, ok) and grabbed my camera. I didn't have my good binos (vintage Leica) but the camera had decent zoom. It was blasting wind and the condor was riding it like a roller coaster, sometimes straight over me, then seconds later a half mile north, then back, high, low. In the zoo, they just sit; here, it was in its element and full of life.
A few years ago I visited Sydney's Royal Botanic Garden, walked around for a bit, then sat and read on a bench (Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk) for a couple of hours as the sun set. I happened to read a particularly affecting section where a main character's death is narrated from a strange limited omniscient perspective. And then a rainbow lorikeet [1] alit on the far end of my bench and aimlessly walked around for a minute or so before flying away again.
Not exactly a rare bird for the area, but the confluence of events was memorable.
Maybe a toucan near Iguazu Falls. I’d always kind of assumed they were some silly Froot Loops cartoon birds. But watching one fly through the forest, it was incredibly graceful and majestic.
I was camping in Badlands National Park when a thunderstorm rolled through and lightning struck about a thousand feet away. The next day I went exploring to try to find where it hit. After crossing a stream and hiking up a small butte, I watched what looked like a golden eagle soaring on the wind looking for prairie dogs. The coolest part was that because I was up on a butte the eagle was beneath me and I could see it from above.
I'd presume the donation goes toward the Ornithology department specifically, which probably isn't the best-funded in the university. It's not like they expect you to send in hundreds, just a buck here and there to encourage them to keep working on the database.
It has standard packs that are for common birds in the continental US, but also dozens of others for other regions all around the world that you can download for free. I've used it in Hawaii, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, and Portugal.
https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/