I'm a big fan of Merlin and learning more about its development changed my perspective on software development! I wrote about that here: https://digitalseams.com/blog/what-birdsong-and-backends-can...
replyThanks for sharing this. I love Merlin but never knew how they got it to be so good. Blood, sweat, and tears - of course - as everything actually valuable and useful requires.
replyMerlin is great for identifying birds, but I could never understand how to just post the information to the community for them to verify the observation. Compared to Seek / iNaturalist I find the uploading process complicated and I still have no idea how to do it.
replyThere's Merlin and then there's Birdnet too https://birdnet.cornell.edu/. Both by Cornell.
replyI've been using birdnet, but it seems to want an internet connection to do the identification and sometimes that is dicey when there is a bird that I want to identify. (Also birds seem to shut up around the time you get the app open.)
replyI'm going to give Merlin a try - the app has UI to download the network for offline use.
Requiring an internet connection for a nature app is absurd. As annoying as it is I get why a big tech company like Google fails at this sort of thing, many of their employees probably never leave a city and so the products always work well for them. But a nature app has no excuse, normal usage will get blocked by that all the time.
replyThat's what Merlin is for but it's a ~450mb install. BirdNet is only a ~30MB install and birds are everywhere, so what's wrong with having an online option for most people who spend most of their time within range of a cel tower?
replybirdnet pi or go run the model locally
with an option to push observations
back to Cornell
replyAaand if you like birds, Listers documentary is a lot of fun https://youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo
replyThe funny thing is I got into birds because of the app. I hike alone often. Identifying the bird and then challenging myself to identify it correctly from memory going forward (before double checking with the app) is a fun game that draws one into the environment. Then, once you remember the bird (or, in my case, whatever nickname I came up with) you start learning and remembering facts about the bird.
replyEven if you don't like birds... It's one of my favorite things I've ever watched.
replyBest movie of the year hands down
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