A New App for Birders Takes Flight

I grew up in a place where at any given time of day, a critter chorus was in full swing—birds during daylight hours, and come nightfall, frogs and the occasional pack of coyotes. Birdsong in particular, though, is imprinted in my mind as the sound of home. Often I’d wonder about the species that was singing right outside my front door, curious as to which birds were the source of each chirruping sound. Fortunately, Massachusetts-based Wildlife Acoustics Inc. has released a new app called Song Sleuth to help identify the feathered artists behind the music.

Wildlife Acoustics, Inc. offers some of the top technologies in bioacoustics monitoring—the study of animal sounds’ production, transmission, and reception. This enables researchers, animal biologists, and conservationists to better monitor the activity and health of animal populations. Wildlife Acoustics’s various technologies have helped to further the study of bird, bat, insect, frog, and even rhino populations, and to facilitate conservation endeavors, too. For instance, the company partnered with the Organization for Bat Conservation to help monitor bats’ activity on wind farms, where contact with wind turbines results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of them each year.

With Song Sleuth, Wildlife Acoustics is looking to broaden the scope of its technology beyond scientific research and give anyone with a smartphone the ability to carry around his or her own bioacoustic monitoring tool. The company joined forces with world-renowned ornithologist David Sibley to develop the app, which recognizes the songs of almost 200 different bird species found in North America. Here’s how it works: Users record a bird’s song, and Song Sleuth suggests the three birds most likely to have produced the tune. The app includes reference recordings for each bird, which users can compare with their live recording.

Complete with Sibley’s original illustrations, seasonal range maps, and specific information on each bird species, Song Sleuth provides a hands-on, multisensory learning experience for the eyes and the ears. The app also includes a spectrogram—a color-coded picture of sound that allows listeners to distinguish between similar birdsongs—and allows users to map and catalog each of their recordings. This way, you can return to a particular spot at a particular time and hopefully reconnect with a bird friend.

Whether or not you can already distinguish the birdsong of the American robin from the black-headed grosbeak, Song Sleuth provides an informative foray into the musical world of birds.