TELL ME
Birds. I guess it doesn’t feel that niche because I know lots of people are into bird watching, but it’s my thing.
There’s this app called Merlin that I swear to god is magic. You can just open your mic and it’ll listen to and identify all of the birds you’re hearing.
And it really works! For the longest time, it kept identifying a Carolina Wren in my yard, and I thought it was just wrong. I’ll be damned if I didn’t eventually see that wren, and now it frequents the bird feeder I set up on my deck. It’s just my shyest bird. But the app knew it was out there.
I’ve learned so much about birds and identifying them from using the app. And I’ve gotten really into how, when, and what to feed birds because I want to find more different kinds, and I just love watching them on the deck interacting. I call it my cat TV haha
I’m also learning a ton about owls specifically over on the superbowl@lemmy.world community. Did you know there are owls in the desert and owls in Jamaica? Come over to the community where @anon6789@lemmy.world makes the most amazing educational posts. It’s a lot of fun.
I’m glad I’m still considered educational and not just a weirdo! 😜
Owls have been around for millions of years and are very adaptable, so there are many cool variations and unique behaviors and more. There are over 250 species of owls alive today, and since they are reclusive and nocturnal, they’ve historically been hard to study, so we’re still learning new things about them all the time.
I’m still thinking about that BirdPi that data maps the bird calls automatically. I wonder if it can pinpoint habits of my rare visitors like the Northern Flicker to increase my chances of seeing it.
Oh interesting! I had never heard of BirdNet or Bird Pi. It looks like Cornell Lab integrated that machine learning project into the Merlin app:
Merlin also sound identifies a Northern Flicker in the woods behind my house that I’ve yet to see.
And yes educational! It was your long form posts from a couple months ago that really drew me into the community. I was just really impressed with the level of detail and really appreciated it. I like learning new things that I wouldn’t necessarily take the time to seek out myself. I was reading those even though I didn’t comment much at the time.
Found the post. It looks like it’s onigiri@lemm.ee that has it. Here’s one of the regular commenters, and he gives a link in his comment here:
I’ve only seen the Flicker twice in about 15 years of living here so I get very excited when I catch him.
That’s why I tell people to comment even if it’s just like “oh that’s really cool. I learned something.” The talon post was huge and took a week to write and was huge, so I wrote one or 2 more and people were all quiet, so all I’m left with to think is I guess nobody was interested or it was too long, etc. If I can do a funny pic with a 2 sentence caption that gets the same or better reaction than me writing a paper after spending a day reading a research paper and collecting citations, guess which posts you’re gonna get! 😆
I’m reading the stuff regardless, but I don’t wanna be the person all day talking to themselves! I want to interact with the people of the group. We got almost 3k subs now, but there’s maybe a dozen of you that talk to me, which I appreciate! But I wish it was a bigger chunk of the people.
Like I said in my SuperbOwl wrap up, I may be the one posting every day, but you guys are equally important to the community because you guys interacting is what keeps me motivated to make the posts. Even my quickest posts probably take 15-30 minutes of scrolling to find a story, writing a summary, and uploading pics. The benefit to me is zero, cuz I’ve already seen it. I do it to get you guys excited, and I want to see that excitement or I don’t know it’s there.
Ok, rambling on now so I’m donnnnnne.
I got a fun Barred Owl pic, a fun Hawk Owl pic, and some new quick owl research in my drafts folder. Which one do you want to see tomorrow?
I moved a little over a year ago and have faced the transition from crows, bluejays, doves, and a charming married cardinal couple to lots of stray cats and zero birds.
I did not expect how much of a bummer this would be.
Living city center I used to be very pleased seeing anything else then a pigeon from my window once in a while, even if it was just a common blackbird or a great tit. Then I moved to the edge of the city, these are so super common they’ve become boring to observe haha, I need birds of pray to trigger that now. People need greens and birds around them.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !superbowl@lemmy.world
