ChirpOMatic - Birdsong Europe 4+

To my shame, I do not know too much about our native birds in the UK. But with this app I am beginning to learn more, and it is very enjoyable to do so. I hear a bird singing in my garden , on a walk, or wherever. And out comes my phone, tap on the app, tap on ‘record’ , wait a few seconds….. then, by way of identifying the bird, you are either (a) given the name of a single bird to consider as the actual provider of the sound you have heard and you can select yes or no (you do this by playing the app’s own recording of the suggested bird’s sound, then agreeing or disagreeing) OR (b) when the quality of your recording is less than perfect (background noise etc), you may be given a shortlist of candidates, and by the above process you may be able to whittle it down to one bird. Once you have identified the bird, the app provides a bit more information about the chirpy chappie. And you have the satisfactory feeling of knowing a little bit more about the natural environment you live in. And your recording gets added to your ‘library’.

Thank you so much for providing this incredible app.

Clearly it cannot produce 100% accurate results, but in my experience of using it over around 6 months, providing you give the app a fighting chance by trying to record the song in isolation (of course this is often tricky to do!) and without extraneous noises, I’m amazed at how frequently it gets the right results. Such fantastic technology always at hand! What a thrill to identify one of the less common birds! I could go on!

Probably impossible to get this app perfect because it is rare to get a recording without either other bird sounds or background road traffic which cause spurious results. However I have found it a useful guide and it is better when you get home and use online analysis. Also you have evidence a species was present at a certain area on a recorded date. I got it to help identify warblers and although It hasn’t got the result correct in first place very often if you take several records and compare with the sample recordings you get the correct identification. At present I do not trust it without a good sighting to verify. I expect to get more proficient with practice and I’ve only made around 30 recordings so far and expect to be more confident with increased use.