Birds in the Morning & an Identifier App

Every morning, my wife and I wake up to the sounds of birds cheeping. It’s a lovely thing. Bird feeders hang above the deck at our home, and we identify our enthusiastic gang of birds by noting their colors, size and behavior to then look up what they are in our copy of the Sibley bird book.

The sound that wakes us, however, is not coming from our front deck. It is coming from our cellphones, set on our night tables to wake us up at 8 and 8:20 respectively. The recorded birds chatter away.

I suspect these are the chirps made by real birds, probably recorded by techies outside of their Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California. The birds of Santa Clara County. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

And then I realized we had an app on our phones that could identify those bird chirpings. This app has been threatening to end our use of the Sibley bird book. Tap the phone app and wait for the bird to speak. Instantly, a picture of the bird appears. And there’s its name, habits and habitat location.

“Think it will tell us what birds made these recordings?” I asked my wife.

She replayed the wakeup call. And as she did, I tapped the bird identifier app. It fell for the ruse. Our birds were: A Brown Thrasher, a Song Sparrow, an American Crow, a Brown Crepper and a Swainson’s Thrush.

West coast birds? No. Common birds you find all over the country? Yup. The techies had a mission. Every place in America would know these chirpings.

Beyond our deck and across the street is one of the grandest views in the Hamptons. As many as 100 boats rock in their slips at four marinas.  And beyond the marinas, the sun sets over the hills of Three Mile Harbor on the far side.

Sometimes large yachts cruise into the harbor. I have the Marine Traffic identifier app on my phone.  It shows a map of Long Island, and when you zoom in to our harbor, it pinpoints the bigger yachts. It shows the name, serial number, length and owner. Also where it was registered. It won’t tell who the people are on board, but I suspect that is coming. However, if there’s a bird onboard, I probably can tell what it is.

There’s lots else going on in our harbor. Sailboats. Fishing boats. Motorboats. Eagles, swans, yachts, seagulls, hawks. Paddle Diva is here. It’s a business. She stands on a surfboard paddling a big oar, and with it leads a group of awkward trainees behind her trying to keep up. They go out through the inlet. Return in the afternoon. Most of them. Better watch out when I download the app that can tell me their names.

We also have an osprey family nesting atop a wood platform on a pole at the Vanderveer Marina. Mom is Olivia. Dad is Otto.

Sharks swim into our harbor. The shark tracker app, made after the Woods Hole Massachusetts people tag the sharks, is at the ready. I don’t use it though. Doesn’t count underwater, unless one bites me.