ITHACA, N.Y. — Looking for larks? Searching for surfbirds? Checking for chickadees? There's an app for that.
BirdsEye, a new application for the iPhone and the iPod touch, is now available. Using content from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Academy of Natural Sciences and bird expert Kenn Kaufman, this new application was developed by Birds in the Hand, LLC.
Learn where specific birds have been observed and obtain directions to the site. The new app offers a list of birds seen near your location and a map of birding hotspots for any point in North America – the contiguous 48 states, Canada, and Alaska. BirdsEye includes images and audio for 470 of the species that are most frequently observed in North America. Even for elusive birds, additional content is available — for a total of 847 species. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library archive, the largest collection of bird and animal sounds in the world, provided bird sounds, while the VIREO collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences provided the images. Kaufman wrote text for each species.
BirdsEye accesses real-time observations that bird watchers submit online to eBird, a citizen-science project of the Cornell Lab and Audubon. Users of eBird file up to two million bird observation reports each month. The ability to submit observations to eBird directly from BirdsEye is already in the planning stage.
Portions of BirdsEye sales go back to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to help support its research, education, and citizen science projects focused on birds, and to the Academy of Natural Sciences to support VIREO, the world's largest collection of bird photographs.
Web sites:
Cornell Lab of Ornithology:
www.birds.cornell.edu
eBird:
www.ebird.org
BirdsEye:
www.getbirdseye.com