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FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | MARCH 2024 17 By Steve Benoff I've decided to spare you. I'm not going to sing the praises of the Overcast podcast app. Suffice it to say I was listening to a sports podcast about basketball wherein it was mentioned that several professional basketball players are also bird watchers. These guys do a lot of traveling throughout their 82-game regular season and have a lot of spare time on their hands. So, it isn't that surprising that some of them would spend their time observing nature and birds in particular. Speaking of birding, did you know I was Director of Corporate Communications for Tiger International? This was back in the 1970s. One of these days I'll tell you how I managed to survive the gas crisis unscathed thanks to a "friend" who later owned the wildly- successful male strip club Chippendales and eventually went to prison for murder. (Talk about the power of the internet, I couldn't remember the name of the club so I googled "LA club owner who went to prison for murder" and his name came up, sadly with several others.) Part of my duties, besides flying around Europe in our corporate jet, was being responsible for the design and printing of our annual report. Annual reports don't have the significance these days that they had 50 years ago. These days investors go to corporate websites and various services to view reports required of public companies by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Back then, the design of annual reports was a big deal. We spent many thousands on design alone. Funny story. One year, our Chairman/CEO told me we were spending too much money for the party I would host after the release of the annual report. So, I had our printer host it and bury the cost in their bill. And it's the printer I want to focus on. Jim Clements was a serious birder. He traveled the world to shoot birds. He did his shooting with his camera. He prided himself on having observed birds on every continent of the world. He even authored a birder's guidebook containing over 9800 bird species. Jim would have been amazed at birding apps. Here we go again. I'm about to embark on a subject I know nothing about. But just as I did with the apps for identifying trees and plants, I'm going to try to cover some apps that may help my bird watching readers. You can skip the rest of this article by doing what I did. Google birding apps. There are plenty of them and many sites that are happy to rank them for you. For this article I've consulted Bird Watching HQ. Some of these are free and some not. Rather than make a judgment call on that, I'll let you explore those that interest you. I've listed them in their ranked order though I won't include every app on their list. iBird Pro Guide to Birds – "It's super easy to search for birds using different features (size, color, location, etc.). It's also nice that they have both drawings and pictures of each bird, which really helps [to] correctly identify each species. Lastly, the vast library of sounds is also extremely valuable. Being able to compare sounds and calls has assisted in many tricky identifications." (By the way, did you know that Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus formalized the binomial naming system for plants and animals still in use today whereby each species is first given a genus name and then a species name? I didn't know that until I listened to a BBC podcast on Linnaeus.) Audubon Bird Guide – This app is "a fantastic electronic field guide" the most significant aspect of which is that it's free. "If you are a beginner birder, [get] this app before spending money on one of the other field guides." Merlin Bird ID – This app was created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It "uses Artificial Intelligence to help identification. If you [see] a mystery bird, you can use [it] one of two ways: Answer five simple questions or upload or take a picture of the bird…. [It] can also make suggestions on birds that you heard." The Warbler Guide – "Seeing a warbler is one thing, but trying to identify the correct species is a whole other challenge. This birding app is useful because it focuses on helping to identify warblers by sight or song as quickly and efficiently as possible." Raptor ID – "Raptors are incredibly hard … to identify. Normally they are soaring too far away to get a good view…. [This app] has a lot of resources to help identify raptors in flight." eBird – This app is the highest-rated checklist app for birding. "It keeps track of every bird you have ever seen and organizes the data in just about any way you can imagine." Happy birding. If you use an app you'd like to share with others, let me know at steve.benoff@verizon.net. THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT! These Apps Are For The Birds

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