bird-watching

Say 'Cheep'! Bird Photo Booth for high-tech bird watchers

Wild birds are notoriously fickle photography subjects. Getting up-close pics usually requires an expensive camera, a honking zoom lens, and the ability to hold extremely still for long periods of time.

The $149 Bird Photo Booth on Kickstarter combines a bird-feeding platform with a place to stash a camera for taking avian glamor shots without upsetting the skittish subjects. The device comes with foam insert adapters for iPhone, iPod Touch, and GoPro cameras. A universal Android insert is under development.… Read more

Birdcall scanner is nothing to squawk about

We have a theory: At some point in the universe there's a convergence of birding and technology, along the lines of math and music. It's the only explanation we can come up with for so many avian gadgets that seem to come our way, which often indicate a particular demand for technologies that identify birdcalls.

Not all of them are the most practical, however, as underscored by the unwieldy size of such products as the "Sound Sleuth" weighing you down, fittingly, like an albatross around your neck. But the "iFlyer BirdSong Wand" seems like … Read more

How to get the upper hand in Bird-Watching 101

This looks kind of like the slide projector that we used in my third-grade social studies class back in...whenever I was in third grade. But it's not: it's actually a digital tool to enhance the experience of bird-watching, called the Song Sleuth Digital Bird Detector. Turn it on, and it can decipher 160,000 different bird calls in real time, thanks to audio data from Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology. It can also record sound so that you can put it on your computer later, for whatever reason.

I might be wrong about this, as bird-watching … Read more