New Book & App Upgrade From National Geographic

First person to guess in the comments what color nail polish I'm wearing wins a code to get the new National Geographic Field Guide app for the iPhone. (You can either guess the color name or what the color actually is.  HINT: It's from the Skyfall Collection of nail polish). I've long been a fan of National Geographic.  They were my preferred field guide when I was a kid and way back before we were iPhone and Android crazy and they were one of the first when they had the idea of putting their field guide on a Palm Pilot.  Now there's a blast from my blog's past! That's a blog entry I wrote over seven years ago...yikes, how long have I been doing this?

As field guides are establishing themselves firmly on the smartphone train, National Geographic released their iPhone app a few years ago.  I was disappointed. The illustrations were there, but as an iPhone app, it wasn't very intuitive, didn't do what most of the other apps did.  It was as if someone did a hasty job of taking the Palm Pilot version and wedged into an iPhone app and had the same results that a woman who wears a size eight shoe has when she tries to wear six six high heels.  You get the idea, but it's uncomfortable.

There is a new version! If you already bought the app and like me took it off your phone and it's been collecting dust in iTunes, update that bad boy right now and reinstall to get the new version.  If you are a fan of National Geographic illustrations, you'll enjoy this app.  It has all the images from the book and includes songs and calls for each species (as well as a sonogram).  You get the text of where to find the birds, their behavior, field marks--everything you want in a field guide.

If you see a bird and you don't know what it is, you can filter your search in the guide by color, size, range and time of year to narrow down your list of possibilities.  Man, remember when we first started birding and if we saw a small brown bird we had to sift through a field guide and try to figure out the difference between a female finch and a sparrow?

Now, this app comes with a price--it's HUGE!  In the field, Sibley may be one of the heavies, but in app form he's only 446.7 MB.  National Geographic has him beat at 880.9 MB (still not quite as big as Audubon's 924.3 MB). I had to remove some apps on my phone to get this app to fit.  Not only is this a guide, but you also get articles on how to watch birds, how to choose binoculars, listing capability (including mapping your location) and creating field notes.  Also included are some high definition videos which I think contributes to the app's large size, but hey, if you are jonesing to see and hear a bobolink...the app can help you out by showing a video.

I think my favorite feature on this app are the quizzes!  You have three levels: Beginner, Intermediate and Expert.  The Beginner Level might play a song or show a picture and give you choices to id the singer or illustration.

The expert level...well, it challenges you.  I only got 7 out of 10 questions correct on level 10 and more than three were guesses on my part. But I like an app that encourages me to learn from it. So, this is a vast improvement to the old National Geographic.  It doesn't have the comparison feature that I do appreciate on the Sibley app but the other features more than make up for it.

 

Now, if you are staunchly in the Luddite category and have had enough of the app business...check out the new National Geographic Bird Watcher's Bible. This book is not for the hardcore birder. It's a great kind of intro book for someone who is casually interested in birds. Maybe even a kid who is into the old form school of reading books.

The book uses a combination of great photos (check out that shot of a peregrine falcon nailing a willet) and National Geographic illustrations (cause hey, they own the rights and they can be good filler) to give you an eye catching book with fun factoids like,"Only 29 birds that regularly breed in North America have one-word names."

The book covers a little of everything from bird anatomy, history, migration, how to be a birders and I must say, even includes a mention of the Internet.  I would have loved this book when I was a kid and I would give this book as a gift if one of Non Birding Bill's friends told me, "Hey, I noticed this bird once, what is it?"

The book even includes a list of "Most Common Bird Blogs," not the best, not the most read, not the oldest or most prolific...the most common.  Regardless of how they phrase it, I'm honored to have my blog included in that list among some of my favorite people like 10,000 Birds, Nemesis Bird and Birding is Fun.

 

 

Podcast #124: Birds Eating Each Other, Birder Reality Show? Birder Movie?

Warning...links to potentially gross photos. If you click on a link and are disturbed, I don't want to know about it. Really gross photo of a bald eagle and a mallard (gross but AWESOME). 'Merica!

Sam Galick got some amazeballs photos of a northern goshawk taking out a Cooper's hawk.

Sparrowhawk nails rare wayward cliff swallow in Sweden.

Birders are gaining in popularity.  Another birder movie might be coming if it gets the rest of its funding on Kickstarter (c'mon, it's got Fred Willard) and...a birder reality show in the works???

California restaurant owners build restaurants near the sea where there are birds and sea lions...and get upset about the smell.


Because I Love Bird Camouflage

I was recently at the Rio Grande Valley Bird Festival in Harlingen, TX. If you can't tell by how often I talk about South Texas, it's one of my favorite places to visit not only for the birds, but also for the great friends I've made at the festival. Next year is the 20th Anniversary of the festival, it should be a wild time and if you have never been, you should have it on your bucket list.

I have an odd checklist when I visit, I've seen almost everything I can possible see there but getting the key valley species as soon as I arrive is always fun (like the above great kiskadee). This time I went with a new friend that I made at the Biggest Week In Birding Festival in Ohio last May. She had never been to the valley so showing someone all those great Texas specialties for the first time is as fun for me as seeing them the first time.

I could spend several days at Estero Llano Grande (and have) and this photo though not the best on the planet is a great cross section of the amazeballs birding that can happen. In one scope view I have green kingfisher, American bittern and great kiskadee.  I ask you, where else would you get such a great birding trifecta in the same field of view? South Texas, it's hard to beat.

I swear there is a bird in the above photo.

Estero is where the nightjar known as the common pauraque is relatively easy to find. I've posted about their camouflage before. And though we were able to find them easily in that same spot, we were pointed out more parauques by field trip leaders that were hunkered down in yards of people who live next to Estero.  There's one in the above photo...can you find it (even Non Birding Bill was able to find to find it in the photo).

Yep. I swear there's a bird in the above photo too.  That's the pauraque in the "usual spot" at Estero.  There are actually about two or three in this spot (but only one in the above photo). I know brown birds aren't for everybody. I know that I can seem unreasonable in my love of things like native sparrows and pipits but you have to give it to pauraques as a brown bird. They at least stay in one spot for several hours to give you a chance to find them.

iPhone Digiscoping Adapters

All sorts of adapters for digiscoping using an iPhone and a spotting scope are cropping up. I can barely keep up with testing them. This post covers two different adapters that are very similar and work well with my Swarovski ATM scope.

From left to right we have the iTelligent iPhone adapter, Kowa iPhone adapter and my Mophie iPhone charging case. My only complaint with these adapters is that they do not work with the Mophie case. The iPhone 4s has a crap battery life and if you are going to use your phone to take photos and videos, that battery life is going to get eaten up quickly. If someone could find a way to make an adapter that would work with a Mophie case or if someone could create a digiscoping adapter that is also an iPhone battery charging case, I'd be one happy little clam.  And I don't want to hear about how that would be cost prohibitive when Mophie cases run $79 - $99 and digiscoping adapters run $65 - $199.  I don't think my dream is unreasonable.

But enough of my battery charging rant.

The iTelligent adapter is a case that goes around your iPhone and works with the Swarovski DCA adapter using the M37 ring. I know Swarovski is changing their digiscoping adapters but quite a few of us have DCAs already so this can be a good solution to holding an iPhone steady up against a scope eye piece. I've used the DCA adapter for years to slide a point and shoot or SLR camera over my scope eye piece. It's fast and easy to use. It may seem awkward to have the DCA on an iPhone, but if you are used to having the DCA on a camera in the field, it's easy to adjust to toting it with your phone. The DCA easily screws on and off the case, so you don't have to have it on all them time.

I usually have one of those Women of the Cloud Forest totes with me and this fits easily in there.

The Kowa adapter works without the DCA adapter and is a little skinnier. The Kowa adapter is the one on the right with my finger on it. It wedges on to the scope's eye piece and doesn't have the locking mechanism that the DCA has, but stays firmly in place. I wouldn't leave it unattended, a good bump to the scope could cause it to fall (but that's just common sense with any sort of camera when digiscoping). You do have to do a little futzing to get the full image, but it does the trick and fits in a pants pocket. You can take the ring off of the case too.

I played around with both the Swarovski  20-60 zoom eye piece and 25-50 zoom eye piece. The 25-50 works best with an iPhone 4s. Above is a shot I took with the 20-60 and you can see that there is some serious vignetting which you can get rid of by zooming in the image on the iPhone (not zooming in with the scope eye piece).

But if you start with the 25-50 zoom eye piece you have very little vignetting.

When you use the video feature with your iPhone 4s, you do not have the option of zooming in.  If you use the 20-60 eye piece you will have vignetting which you can edit out using a program like iMovie. Or you can use the 25-50 eye piece and have not vignetting in video mode.

I took a couple of short videos with each adapter and the 25-50 eye piece so you can see how they work.

Here is the iTelligent adapter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-KIjEAn-oc

Here is the Kowa adapter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6JTKhc5C1U

Both work well and are fun way to digiscope. And with both of these adapters, you can still actually use your iPhone to text and you know...phone calls.

 

Birdchick Podcast #122: Hurricane Birds, Owl vs Cat

Please don't read the comments under this photo cause it's just gonna make you angry. But here's an intriguing photo captured on a Minnesota trail cam that appears to have captured a barred owl going after a cat.  This is posted on Facebook, so you may have to be logged in to Facebook to see it. Sexy bird costumes.

Hmm. Birding Is Fun has generated a list of "Birding Power Couples." Why are we on it?

eBird's Brian Sullivan talks about what can happen when a hurricane like Sandy hits during mirgration. Here's a good article detailing what birds can and will do when a hurricane hits. And here's an interview with ABA president Jeff Gordon.

There's already a Facebook gallery of Sandy birds.

I'm on another podcast called Obsessed with Joseph Scrimshaw. If you like profanity...you'll love this. Do not listen to on speakers at work.