Bringing birding identification to your ipod.

Many people now own an iPhone or alternatively own an iPod Touch. I took the time recently to play with a couple of birding applications available for these devices and thought that you might be interested in hearing about these. The two applications I reviewed are "Chirp USA" and "Audobon Guides". These applications are available to purchase from the ITunes store.

Chirp USA ($2.99 to purchase): This app familiarizes you with the birds in your area and their songs. The first thing to note on this application is the "USA" in the title. This means that the birds are based on the states and regions of the US. So in order to use "location" as a selection criteria you will need to select a state that is similar or close to your province.

That aside, you can choose "all birds" as well which selects all the birds in the database. After you have selected a location or all birds then you can go the "Listen" or "Challenge" section of the application. In the listen section, you can sort birds by the most common types of birds, by bird song style or by alphabetical order. Then you can listen to the songs of the birds you are interested in. Also, you can link from the bird song to the Cornell website which provides you with more information on the selected bird.

The "challenge" section of the website is great. There you can select the birds that you are most interested in, and quiz yourself on their calls. A bird song is played and you have to pick the picture of the bird it belongs to.

I think this application would be good for a beginning birder. If you are out in the wilderness with your iPhone or iPod touch, you would be able to use this application to help you identify birds and their calls.

Audobon guides ($19.99 to purchase): This app is like the Audobon field guide but on your handheld device. The guide has multiple pictures and also multiple song examples for each type of bird. It also has textual descriptive information on each bird. It also allows you to do some data recording: for example documenting bird sitings and organizing your own birding photographs in albums.

The field guide provides the functionality for sorting birds by families and provides the option of finding similar birds - again this is great for trying to identify an unknown bird.

Audobon guides is not USA specific so it is a bit better from a Canadian perspective. However, it doesn't have nice features like sorting by common birds or sorting birds by location. It is a bit less user friendly and it doesn't have the fun aspect of the challenge exersises that you find in Chirp USA. However, I would say that for serious birders, this application is probably the better of the two.

Birding applications on handheld devices are neat tools for anyone who enjoys identifying birds while hiking or camping. These are two applications to choose from - you be the judge.