Midlands Birding Blog

The relatively recent rise in popularity of birding "tools" such as the Merlin Bird Identification app  and Swarovski’s dG which identifies the wildlife it focuses on reflects a universal explosion in machine learning and artificial intelligence in general. Artificial intelligence or AI has taken over in most industries and is now used to complete incredibly complex tasks, ranging from automatically labelling CCTV footage to understanding and responding to human speech in Alexa and Siri. In some medical diagnosis tasks, machine learning has been found to perform better than doctors themselves. None of these are a far cry from bird identification. If ANPR can identify the letters on a speeding car’s numberplate it won’t be long before a camera is able to reliably identify passing birds, especially given Merlin’s demonstrable identification skills. Merlin relatively recently released the sound identification extension to its birding app which can identify (or at least give sug...

Last summer, there was an attempt on Twitter to produce the official wader league table between the UK reserves, ranking them on how many species they had recorded over the entire lifetime of the reserve. The results shocked me! As a young birder, there were reserves at the top that I never would have predicted: Blacktoft Sands (52 species) above Frampton Marsh (47); Breydon (55) above Titchwell (53); Pagham Harbour (56) above Spurn (55). Ask any young birder to name a top 10 site for waders and they'd probably say Frampton Marsh. Yet just over a decade ago it was a collection of fields and consequently it finds itself a long way down the table at position 37! In this way, birding perspectives change with every generation. If you were looking to live in a mainland rarity hotspot, this year you might go house hunting in East Yorkshire! Yet, a while ago you'd probably be mad not to have picked Norfolk.  Perspectives can change dramatically in the short term too. Birds are unpredi...

In the middle of winter, during those long, often birdless, walks around our patch with few more species on our list than there were at the end of New Years' Day, we could all do with a bit of motivation. A reminder that anything can happen in birding, even things that seem scarcely believable. I spend a lot of time in Devon and one of my favourite areas is the Axe Estuary. On the 4th of August 2016, I was down for a week on holiday and, being 20 minutes away, decided to go to Black Hole Marsh on the Axe Estuary to see the Least Sandpiper which had been found 2 days previously. The bird was performing outrageously well from the screens at the base of the hide walkway. Far too close for scopes and close enough that I could get this photo with a phone camera: I've seen plenty of Least Sandpipers in the USA but even there, I have never seen one so close. It gave a great opportunity to study the plumage details. Who knew I'd have to employ them so soon? After getting ...