I have a few birds near my house that I hear almost daily and I would love to learn more about. But obviously Googling a call is difficult. Any tips or ideas for identifying the calls? I’m in the Pacific NW of the US if that helps.
I would recommend BirdNET which is “a joint project of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and Chemnitz University of Technology”. It’s using neural networks and can identify over 3000 species.
BirdNET is very good. it starts recording on booting the app and suggests with probability. You can save soundfiles, get direkt links to wikipedia and can share files with inaturalist or other third party apps. I use it everytime I need to know which bird is singing
BirdNET is great. I was also just recommended Merlin, which does photo ID too. I haven’t had an opportunity to test the sound feature, though.
I’ve had a lot of success using Merlin Bird ID (by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology) to figure out what birds I’m hearing around my house. It listens and detects likely birds based on the songs, and then provides a lot of additional information about the bird and sample songs. It also has other features for helping identify birds visually.
It’s been very informative for understanding that many of the distinct sounds I’m hearing regularly actually come from the same bird. I didn’t realize how much variation a single bird could have until I started using this app.
As for learning the calls, that’s going to come down to standard learning techniques. Merlin Bird ID doesn’t have any flashcard style learning built in.
