71–80 of 88 posts
- https://mushroomobserver.org - crowdsourced database for mushrooms. - https://www.inaturalist.org/observations - plants and animals.
https://bugguide.net - this one is awesome. has photo submissions for identifications
> Identification, Images, & Information
> For Insects, Spiders & Their Kin
> For the United States & Canada
Similar: https://www.xeno-canto.org/ , a crowdsourced bird song database (over 600,000 recordings)
eBird has songs also. But Xeno-canto seems to be the place where most people still record.
I do a bit of wildlife photography in my spare time (follow me on Insta for pictures of British birds and occasionally my cat - https://instagram.com/onion4k ). Recognising birds is surprisingly hard. A lot of them have very subtle differences that can't be spotted easily. For example, telling the difference between a common Thrush[1] and a much less common Redwing[2] is a real challenge. It's a fun and challenging p…
I do a bit of wildlife photography in my spare time (follow me on Insta for pictures of British birds and occasionally my cat - https://instagram.com/onion4k ). Recognising birds is surprisingly hard. A lot of them have very subtle differences that can't be spotted easily. For example, telling the difference between a common Thrush[1] and a much less common Redwing[2] is a real challenge. It's a fun and challenging p…
If you can find a copy of it, read the paper titled "Jizz and the joy of pattern recognition". A great read with some lovely anecdotes about botany and birding. One that I fondly remember is a description of how someone is able to recognize a particular bird when it's just a distant silhouette. "It flies like a sack of potatoes".
To a regular person, the cloaca of male and female baby chicks look identical, but to a chicken sexer who sorts hundreds of baby chicks a day, they look totally different, even if the person can't describe exactly how. To expert radiologists, a shadow in an x-ray is almost certainly cancer, while a non-expert can't see any shadow at all.
Similarly, and more mundanely, in languages where there isn't a strong meaningful distinction between two sounds, speakers have trouble discerning them. To a monolingual native Japanese person, /r/ and /l/ sound almost identical, while a native English speaker can't understand how they don't hear the difference. To a French person, the "oo" sounds in au dessus (on top) and au dessous (underneath) sound completely different, yet to an English person they are almost indistinguishable.
These are really the same phenomena, and why an expert bird watcher would have no trouble recognizing the "sack of potatoes" flight of a bird.
I never knew of this, totally going to sign up. Once upon a time, in the 1990's, I was in the 5th grade and the principal asked us (the class) to pull out our favorite book from our backpacks (she told us the day before to bring our favorite book) and wanted to hear the whole class reading out loud all at once. I pulled out my "Field guide to the birds of North America" [0] and started reading along with everyone els…
Kids should be given more credit. When I was no older than that I would read encyclopedic books about guns and fighter jets. Not birds, but I don’t see how reading non-fiction early is anything but healthy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yet-another login to manage before I am get to sample the data... window closed. I am not their target demo anyway. My understanding is that eBird is only for recording sightings, and not for doing identifications. For identifications you want the Merlin app/page[0]. I don't think eBird/Merlin distinguish that clearly enough. But I think what you're looking for at this point is Merlin, and not eBird. [0] https://ww…
eBird is actually very useful for identifications, because you can check out all photos anyone has ever submitted for that species and pick up subtle variations. Also, you listed the incorrect URL. The correct one is [1], which is an Android and iOS App. The page you linked to is actually the page for the species Merlin, which is a bird in the Falcon family. 1. https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
I do a bit of wildlife photography in my spare time (follow me on Insta for pictures of British birds and occasionally my cat - https://instagram.com/onion4k ). Recognising birds is surprisingly hard. A lot of them have very subtle differences that can't be spotted easily. For example, telling the difference between a common Thrush[1] and a much less common Redwing[2] is a real challenge. It's a fun and challenging p…
Offf, as some one coming from the UK, thrush vs redwing is not even in the difficult category... Try little brown birds of which there are many, they are basically indistinguishable, they love to hide, so notorious they even get their own wikipedia page[1]; or gulls, also many species, as well as several variations of adolescent plumage; or raptors which in the UK you pretty only see as a silhouette while they are hu…
> "Little brown mushrooms" (or LBMs) refers to a large number of small, dull-coloured agaric species, with few macromorphological uniquely distinguishing characteristics.
> As a result, LBMs typically range from difficult to impossible for mushroom hunters to identify.
> For mycologists, LBMs are the equivalent of LBJs ("little brown jobs") and DYCs ("damned yellow composites") that are the bane of ornithologists and botanists, respectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_hunting#Little_brown_...
The world of bird sighting is interesting. I have a friend who runs a cruise expedition company in New Zealand. They run trips in the south seas (Antarctica) as well as the North (Russia, Japan) but they have to reposition their ships between seasons. Those repositioning trips are 3-4 weeks at sea with little-to-no land in sight. So what they did to make money was to sell heavily discounted seats to bird watchers bec…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yet-another login to manage before I am get to sample the data... window closed. I am not their target demo anyway. My understanding is that eBird is only for recording sightings, and not for doing identifications. For identifications you want the Merlin app/page[0]. I don't think eBird/Merlin distinguish that clearly enough. But I think what you're looking for at this point is Merlin, and not eBird. [0] https://ww…
eBird is actually very useful for identifications, because you can check out all photos anyone has ever submitted for that species and pick up subtle variations. Also, you listed the incorrect URL. The correct one is [1], which is an Android and iOS App. The page you linked to is actually the page for the species Merlin, which is a bird in the Falcon family. 1. https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
Oops, thanks for correcting me on that!