“Instant” (almost) Nature ID
Below appear three 4-minute-plus runs of Cornell’s free Merlin app, which identifies the songs and calls of most North American birds. These screen captures are from mid-June on a Sunday, just past 11:00 a.m. in a local nature park. Admittedly this is not the best time of day to find birds, but the mix is still typical of what I would expect this time of year in the upper SC Coastal Plain.
I feel a modicum of superiority in saying that I’m still marginally better than Merlin at this task. I heard a distant, Red-bellied Woodpecker and a Fish Crow that the app missed. I’ve also found Merlin to make an occasional, if fairly rare, mistake. These misses may be more a function of my phone’s microphone sensitivity than the app’s ID accuracy.
I’m very impressed with Merlin as a tool for identifying the birds you hear in your backyard, or on hikes pretty much anywhere in the USA. Its level of accuracy, based on algorithmic pattern matching to existing audio recordings, is astonishing.
The range of apps for identifying native species continues to grow. You can find apps like iNaturalist or its offshoot Seek, to identify just about any organism for which you have a decent photo. Seek attempts to provide an instant ID based on your geographic location, whereas you may need to wait for iNaturalist until a taxonomic specialist or proficient naturalist weighs in with a suggested identification. Both apps are free.
Other apps include PictureThis (paid) and PlantSnap (free) for plants. The latter boasts “AI powered identification.” My general experience with plant identification apps is that they make more mistakes than Merlin. The quality and angle of the photo, as well as framing and plant structures included, make a substantial difference in accuracy. Same with Seek — sometimes it will admit only to being able to identify a plant to genus or group, but sometimes it makes the wrong call.
I expect all these apps, with increasing photo and audio archive data availability and more advanced search algorithms, to get better and better with time.
Much commentary has been written about the benefits of these apps. To summarize, one of their most promising attributes is reintroducing a new generation of outdoor enthusiasts to natural history and the wonders they can experience, from their own backyards to remote wilderness. Wilderness ID assumes you have a cellular signal, but you can also upload saved photos, along with locations, once you’re back online.
The Covid-19 pandemic may have increased the download and use of these nature apps, much as it caused many people to start looking — really looking — at the birds in their own backyards for the first time, or to put out feeders to attract more. These days, natural history events from Bioblitzes to school science projects employ iNaturalist and other apps to attract new people to natural history, and add to our cumulative knowledge base.
All of these are good reasons to cheer the advent of nature apps. We should welcome new nature aficionados however they come. At the same time, my thoughts have increasingly turned to some potential downsides of the technology, which parallel discussions of AI more generally. The drawbacks I have in mind relate specifically to natural history, or how one comes to it. I think I can best illustrate the concept with a bird story.
The bird is one of my “spark birds,” a phrase used to indicate a species that first triggers interest in observing or studying wild birds. I have several such spark candidates, each based on new vistas opened by first sightings. Flocks of “snowbirds” (juncos) and “redbirds” (Northern Cardinals) on snow drifts eating cracked corn chicken feed is the earliest example I can remember. A temporarily stunned and grounded Pileated Woodpecker that flew into a church window was another (fortunately, it recovered). But the bird I’ll focus on here is one I’ve written about before — my first experience with Evening Grosbeaks.
The exact date is a bit fuzzy, but it would have been in the late 1960s to early 1970s. One winter morning a flock of these birds descended on the snow-covered branches of a Norway Spruce in our southwestern Virginia yard. They proceeded to devour many bags of sunflower seeds at the bird feeder we subsequently kept stocked for them, during that and several winters to follow.
These birds appeared suddenly, like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, as if from another dimension. The impact of their bright, contrasting colors and raucous calls is difficult to describe in words. The British term “gobsmacked” comes as close as anything I can think of to their effect on me. I had never seen anything remotely like them.
There were no smart phones, nature apps, nor even the Internet to rely on for identification in those days. Instead, I found them in my dog-eared, pages-falling-out print copy of the Golden Guide to Birds of North America, published in 1966 by Golden Press. That book was a constant field companion for years. It launched me into a lifelong nature interest that expanded to other organisms.
The crux of the story isn’t that field guide itself, but rather the journey it set me on.
That guide was one of the first I can remember with maps of the known distribution of bird species, color coded for breeding, migration, and winter ranges. The map taught me that the Evening Grosbeak is a bird of boreal climes to the north, migrating south to our area and others in the eastern United States in winter.
That revelation led me to learn about other “northern finches” (e.g. redpolls, Purple Finches, and non-finches like Red-breasted Nuthatches) and their irruptive migratory behavior. Often related to low regional winter food supply, in some years irruptions bring birds much farther south and/or in greater numbers than in others.
After the mid- to late-1970s, the number of winter Evening Grosbeaks at home declined precipitously, until today they are an episodic sighting that far south, if at all. Moreover, the populations of many species of birds, insects, and other native wildlife have experienced dramatic and shocking declines.
Credible estimates are that US bird populations have dropped, on average, by 30% in my lifetime, with an estimated 3 billion fewer birds today in North America than in 1970. Evening Grosbeaks themselves are estimated to have declined by 74% between 1966 and 2019. Some species have declined much more than others. And other organisms, most alarmingly insect populations, also appear to be in steep decline.
I read everything I could find about Evening Grosbeaks starting right after my spark sighting, and continue to do so today. Being a biologist has, of course, given me access to published material that has greatly expanded my scope of knowledge. I later learned, for example, that these finches are closely related to the Eurasian Hawfinch, another species with a massive bill that I recently just observed for the first time in Spain.
Some experts have classified these two species in the same genus, Coccothraustes, but others moved the Evening Grosbeak to a different genus, Hesperiphona. Either way, they’re close evolutionary relatives, along with Chinese and Japanese Grosbeaks, several south Asian species, and the Central American Hooded Grosbeak.
All of these Grosbeaks represent a lineage that arose in the distant past and diversified, spreading out among continents in the Old and New Worlds.
The call of the Evening Grosbeak is so loud and raucous that, over several winters, it burned into my memory. I can still instantly recognize a migratory individual today, or one within its normal range, by its sound alone.
So, what’s the point of this story? It’s this: One experience, aided by a printed field guide, launched a deep, immersive natural history journey for me, with more knowledge gained about Evening Grosbeaks in subsequent years. Each sighting, sound, or written article about them added to growing knowledge and experience through time, that etched Evening Grosbeaks indelibly into me.
My greatest concern about [nearly instant] nature apps is that they may not promote a similar cascade of immersive learning and experience after the dopamine hit of an instant ID on a smart phone. The sort of knowledge I built through time was part of the old-school naturalist paradigm. Knowledge started with an observation, moved to identification, and ramified through compounding experience to a visceral feeling for the species in question.
A smattering of experience and facts induced hunger for more, eventually erecting a beautiful scaffold of knowledge and understanding. The scaffold is never complete, always under construction.
Thinking about Evening Grosbeaks today still elicits that original gobsmacked boy peering through a tiny kitchen window at a snowy winter landscape, bedecked with bright yellow, black, brown and white feathers. Moreover, I can call up example after example of other species etched into memory by an initial spark, leading to the same protracted experiential, inquisitive naturalist process. It’s one of the most marvelous and rewarding positive feedback loops in existence.
Bright red efts ambling across dew-dampened moss in June; an outsized rhinoceros (eastern Hercules) beetle clambering up through abscised brown oak leaves; a two-lined salamander scurrying out from under an overturned rock in a brook to a new hideaway; “British solder” lichens flaring red on a stump among a microcosm “forest” of nonvascular plants and fungi.
All were sparks.
There are two potential risks, or perhaps I should say deficits, that I see with nature ID apps for some people. The first is that they will become a crutch that doesn’t lead to this sort of visceral knowing that once developed through time from outdoor experience, for naturalists, farmers, gardeners, sport hunters and fisherpersons.
The second risk is what I call, for lack of a better term, the “gamification” of nature, where “collecting” species on an app becomes little more than collecting Pokémon Trading Cards. Another way of saying this is that the technology itself, with its increasingly astounding bells and whistles, becomes the marvel and the ultimate object of value — in service to entertainment.
If either outcome is as far as nature apps take us, there is little hope for developing a deep and genuine conservation ethic, in my view. Casual experience with nature can become a mere pastime, something one breaks out when the mood hits. Where will the immersive knowledge of natural history come from, or the realization that we need to do much more than experience nature for our own enjoyment? That we need to fight for its continued existence?
The death spiral of populations and species is abetted by inattention. Ignorance may be bliss, but not for long.
Maybe I’m being too pessimistic about the potential downsides of app-based nature experience. There may already be data out there showing that use of these apps does indeed lead to further inquisitiveness and nature appreciation. Or if not, perhaps some enterprising student will test the hypothesis.
There has been substantial recent criticism of John Muir’s social views. A spirited counterpoint to these claims was co-authored by the Sierra Club’s first Black president. One anecdote about Muir which I’ve also written about before explains the stark contrast between nature as a hobby and nature experience as integral part of one’s being.
In a letter to a friend, Muir described his experience upon finding Calypso Orchids blooming in an Ontario bog:
I never before saw a plant so full of life, so perfectly spiritual . . . I felt as if I were in the presence of superior beings who loved me and beckoned me to come. I sat down beside them and wept for joy. Could angels in their better land show us a more beautiful plant? How good is our Heavenly Father in granting us such friends as are these plant-creatures, filling us wherever we go with pleasure so deep, so pure, so endless.
If we are to shepherd the remnants of nature through the narrows of extinction for your great-grandchildren, we need many people who drop to their knees and weep over nature experience. We need those who anguish over nature’s disappearance. We need legions who are filled with awe and wonder, not entertained by clicking through lists and images on a rectangular box of metal and glass resting in their palms.
דורון בן ישי, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
