
KEITH HAMMOND is editor-in-
chief of Make: and believes ravens
are the best bird, because they rawk.
Adobe Stock-Piotr Krzeslak, BirdNET-Pi
In 2016 the bird nerds at the Cornell Lab
of Ornithology collab’ed with coders at TU
Chemnitz in Germany to create BirdNET — an
artificial neural network that recognizes 3,000
different birds by sound alone (birdnet.cornell.
edu). Next they turned it into a free phone app
— imagine stashing John James Audubon, Sir
David Attenborough, and the real James Bond
(legendary ornithologist) in your pocket to help
identify avian species when you’re out on the trail.
But what if you’d like to ID every bird at your
location, ...