Category: Nature

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Nature

Barnes birding

Had a nice day’s birding at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust place at Barnes. Didn’t manage to see or hear the Lesser Whitethroat which was apparently there this morning, but I did see Little Ringed Plover, which scratches one more species off my ’embarrassing gaps’ list: i.e. birds I’m slightly embarrassed to admit I’ve never seen.

Other mildly notable sightings include Buzzard, which is common as muck over most of the country but not in the south east of England, loads of chirruping Sand Martins (i.e. what Americans call ‘Bank Swallows’), Lapwings making those extraordinary noises they make. And nice views of Reed Bunting:

bunting

Not a great photo, I know, but I’m just amazed I managed to get anything at all by holding the camera of my iPhone up to the telescope eyepiece.

Full bird list after the jump, (unless I’ve forgotten something; wasn’t taking notes).

Continue reading “Barnes birding”
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Nature

More on iPhone field guides

This was originally posted in response to a comment from Rik, but I decided to bump it up into a separate post because it got quite long. He said, in response to my post about the iPhone guide to British & Irish butterflies:

So in an ideal world you’d be able to take a photo of butterfly X, touch the screen of the photo to help the software identify where the butterfly is, then get it to phone up a butterfly database which could then send back details to the app of the most likely candidates so you can quickly read up about it.

And I replied:

Your point about ‘where the butterfly is’ is an interesting one: since the iPhone has GPS and knows what time of year it is, I suppose it could theoretically use that information to quickly suggest a list of the most likely species for that area at that time of year. Which would be neat.

There’s a kind of trade-off for field guides between quantity of information and ease of use, so a beginner is often better off with a guide that has fewer species and less information. Otherwise they spend a lot of time looking at species that are extremely unlikely and the process becomes needlessly difficult. Meanwhile the expert who has enough knowledge to sort through the information appreciates having all the detail and the obscure species.

If anything the iPhone potentially exaggerates the problem of having too much information because while there’s the possibility of including more information andmore pictures than in a traditional guide, it’s more difficult to skim through the possibilities than it would be in a book. So finding ways of narrowing down people’s choices, of guiding them through the data, may be one of the key challenges for field guide designers on mobile platforms.

To go back to the GPS example, just being able to quickly eliminate all the species that are not normally found within 100 miles of where you are would be a good start, so if you’re in Kent you’re not looking at species found only in the Scottish highlands. And that would be even more true for a guide that covered a larger area like Europe or the US: imagine how great it would be to have a guide that showed you Spanish butterflies when you were in Spain and Swedish butterflies when you were in Sweden.

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Nature

‘Butterflies of Britain and Ireland’ on the iPhone

Having written a whole post the other day about how much I wanted field guides on the iPhone and was willing to pay good money for them, I was pleased to hear that a new field guide was available in the App Store: Butterflies of Britain and Ireland (iTunes store link).

It’s an interesting reflection on how much I expect to pay for iPhone apps that a price of £9.99 seemed quite a lot, especially since I just paid £13.49 for a field guide to the butterflies of Europe that I’ll probably use about twice a year at most. Perhaps it’s because I just ordered that book (which hasn’t arrived yet) that I slightly balked at buying another field guide to butterflies. They’re not my main interest, after all. Still, by any reasonable standards a tenner isn’t a lot of money.

I haven’t actually used it in the field yet, but here are my immediate impressions. On the positive side, the content is excellent: high quality and comprehensive. My slight reservations are to do with the app’s usability as a field guide. I’ll give you a quick tour of the way the guide works and then explain what I mean.

It opens with a list of butterflies, which can be sorted either taxonomically or alphabetically:

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This list doesn’t scroll quite as smoothly as it might, btw, but that’s a fairly trivial point. When you select a species, you get a screen like this:

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As well as illustrations of the adult butterflies, it also includes the eggs, caterpillars and cocoons, plus a selection of photographs, a distribution map, a calendar, and a text description for each species. Te arrows in the top-right corner move between species.

The illustrations are by the excellent Richard Lewington.

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You can flick from one picture to the next within a species, and zoom in on the illustrations or turn the phone to see them larger in landscape mode. In fact it behaves pretty much like the iPhone’s built-in Photos app, which is effectively what it is.

There are illustrations of male, female, upperside and underside, and sometimes variant forms. And here’s an example of a map:

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The text is also very thorough:

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As you can see, the content is really impressive: detailed, comprehensive and of high quality. I don’t have the expertise to judge the accuracy of the details, but it all appears to be very professional. Incidentally, I suppose one advantage of an electronic guide is that if people do spot any inaccuracies, they can be corrected via a software update.

But as I say, I don’t know how easy it would be to use as a field guide. If you were on a walk in the country, saw a butterfly and wanted to know what it was, it wouldn’t be that easy to quickly see what the possibilities are. There’s no easy way to compare the illustrations or information between two different species. Certainly you don’t have several illustrations on the same page in the way you would with a paper field guide, but also there’s no easy way to flick quickly back and forward between two or three species. You can’t skim through the information.

I don’t want to sound too negative: part of the problem is the fundamental limitations of the technology, particularly the size and resolution of the screen. And it’s still early days; I’m quite sure that over time developers will work out ways to make these apps more usable. The kind of key which is sometimes used for wildflowers, which uses a series of questions to help find the right species (is the stem smooth or hairy? are the leaves in pairs along the stem or alternating?) seems well suited to the iPhone, for example.

For this particular app I would ideally try to make the main screen for each species more informative at a glance: perhaps with a kind of summary screen showing two or three pictures of the adult butterflies — male and female or whatever is appropriate for that species — and a very rough distribution map. It would be a bit crowded and the pictures wouldn’t be very big, but it would be just enough information so you could quickly see whether you wanted to look in more detail or move on to another species. Then you could swipe the screen left to reveal the species screen as it is now, and drill down to find all the juicy details.

So the main species screen could look something like this (apologies for the clumsy mock-up):

splash2

And then you swipe across, or hit a button or whatever, to get the species screen as it is now, with all the more detailed information.

Anyway, I don’t mean to be too picky; as much as anything I’m just thinking out loud because I find it interesting. And despite the pickyness, I’m really pleased to see a British field guide in the App Store, and pleased that it has such high quality content. Hopefully it’s the first of many.

Categories
Nature

Hot bird news!

I saw a firecrest in the park. Which is fab; certainly the best bird I’ve seen in the park, and one of my best sightings for south London.

It’s an attractive bird I haven’t seen for a very long time. And also it has a much commoner relative, the goldcrest, which is very similar looking except or an eyestripe, and so I’ve dutifully been checking every goldcrest I’ve seen for years — hundreds and hundreds of them in total, probably — and it’s gratifying that it has finally paid off.

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Nature Other

iPhone field guides, please

I was interested to read Chris Clarke enthusing about iBird Explorer Plus, a field guide to North American birds for the iPhone, because it’s just about the first application I thought of when the phone was released. There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent piece of software for Europe yet, but hopefully it will come.

It also seems relevant to a discussion that has been rumbling on in various places (e.g. this post which I found via Daring Fireball) about pricing for iPhone applications, about whether all the crappy applications for a couple of dollars will crowd out better software and prevent people from paying a more serious price for them.

Well, I paid £17 (about $30 at the time) for this book, probably the best field guide ever written, and I would cheerfully pay the same again just to have exactly the same information available on my phone. I paid £35 for a 4 CD set of the bird songs and calls of Europe. And I bought an iPod Nano just so I could have those bird songs with me when I was birdwatching. For a really well-designed application for the iPhone that combined the information and illustrations from the Collins guide with added audio and photographic reference, I would pay £40 without thinking and would probably go higher.

And that’s despite the fact that I don’t think the iPhone is ever going to make an ideal field guide: the advantages like portability and multimedia will never quite compensate for the small screen size. For proper birding I would want the book as well. But to have that information with me at all times, I’d certainly pay good money. And why stop there? I also own field guides to British wild flowers, butterflies, moths, trees, fungi, and insects. Since I don’t want to break my back, I don’t normally carry them around with me; I would love to have iPhone versions of them.

The thing is, I have difficulty thinking of pure functionality that you could add to the iPhone that I would spend a lot of money on. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, just that I don’t have the imgination to think what it is. But I would certainly pay for content.

Another example: amazing though Google Maps is, for walking in the UK, it’s no substitute for the appropriate Ordnance Survey map with all the footpaths and pubs marked on it. And while it would be nice to think that OS could sell digital versions of their maps slightly cheaper than the paper ones, I would pay the full price, grumbling a little, if I could. I paid £6 for a buggy version of the London Mini A-Z, so I guess I couldn’t complain about paying the same for an OS map. For a package that gave me coverage for the whole of, say, Sussex, Kent and Surrey at multiple resolutions, £50 or £60 wouldn’t seem like an unreasonable price.

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Nature

Darwin’s other finches

The Galapagos finches are an icon of evolution. But you don’t have to go all the way to the Galapagos to see finches which have evolved different beaks and different body shapes in order to specialise for different kinds of food and different lifestyles.

These are all species of finch that Darwin might conceivably have seen in his garden in Kent, or perhaps when he dropped off his family at the church on Sunday and went for a country walk while they were in the service. Some would have been common; others are long shots. I’ve arranged them in approximate order of beak size in the classic Galapagos fashion.

The reason the Galapagos finches make such a good teaching example is that even to a casual observer they look closely related. Indeed, from personal experience I can say that they offer a tricky identification problem: when you have several species which are only distinguished by size and shape of beak, and those features are highly variable within the species anyway… it can be frustrating.

It’s very easy to use them to tell a straightforward story of a few original finches — maybe just a single pair — being blown across to the islands from South America, and then, as the population grew and split between different islands, diverging to fit into slightly different lifestyles. It is the evolutionary process reduced to the simplest possible case.

The evolutionary history of the species pictured here is no doubt rather more complicated; rather than being isolated on an oceanic archipelago, they are part of a family that ranges around the whole northern hemisphere and into Africa. And they look rather more distinct than the Galapagos species.

Even so, apart from a general similarity of body shape and behaviour, there are some suggestions in the plumage that these birds are related. The fact that so many species of finch have one or two pale wingbars is probably not a coincidence. And, after all, that’s what we mean when we say that species are part of the same family: they are all descended from some single ancestral species of finch. Perhaps that original finch had wingbars. Notice as well that they nearly all have slightly forked tails.

And although the story of these finches is so much more complicated and wide-ranging than the Galapagos species, it is essentially the same thing. Those first few finches may not have been isolated on an oceanic island, but it is still a story of a few ancestral birds, somewhere, who bred and spread into different areas, formed different populations, and adapted to subtly different ecological niches. There are still plenty of similarities; they are basically seed eaters, they tend to have complex songs, they are largely arboreal. But they vary from goldfinches who eat thistle seeds to hawfinches with a beak strong enough to crack open a cherry stone.

Darwin actually mentions finches in The Origin of Species. Since 1859, we have become more used to the idea that taxonomical groups (like ‘finches’) equate to shared bloodlines. But the things we know intellectually may still be hard to internalise. So it’s not surprising that, before he had told the world his idea, Darwin found people were uncomfortable with it:

when I first kept pigeons and watched the several kinds, knowing well how true they bred, I felt fully as much difficulty in believing that they could have descended from a common parent, as any naturalist could in coming to a similar conclusion in regard to the many species of finches, or other large groups of birds, in nature. One circumstance has struck me much; namely, that all the breeders of the various domestic animals and the cultivators of plants, with whom I have ever conversed, or whose treatises I have read, are firmly convinced that the several breeds to which each has attended, are descended from so many aboriginally distinct species. Ask, as I have asked, a celebrated raiser of Hereford cattle, whether his cattle might not have descended from long-horns, and he will laugh you to scorn. I have never met a pigeon, or poultry, or duck, or rabbit fancier, who was not fully convinced that each main breed was descended from a distinct species. Van Mons, in his treatise on pears and apples, shows how utterly he disbelieves that the several sorts, for instance a Ribston-pippin or Codlin-apple, could ever have proceeded from the seeds of the same tree. Innumerable other examples could be given. The explanation, I think, is simple: from long-continued study they are strongly impressed with the differences between the several races; and though they well know that each race varies slightly, for they win their prizes by selecting such slight differences, yet they ignore all general arguments, and refuse to sum up in their minds slight differences accumulated during many successive generations. May not those naturalists who, knowing far less of the laws of inheritance than does the breeder, and knowing no more than he does of the intermediate links in the long lines of descent, yet admit that many of our domestic races have descended from the same parents—may they not learn a lesson of caution, when they deride the idea of species in a state of nature being lineal descendants of other species?

The Galapagos finches, incidentally, are not actually ‘true’ finches. That is, they are not members of the Fringillidae, the family that includes all the species pictured here. They were previously thought to be in the Emberizidae, another large family of seed-eating birds including the buntings, American sparrows, juncos and towhees. But apparently (and I’m only getting my information here from Wikipedia) the latest thinking is that they are tanagers.

Meanwhile, DNA testing has shown another notable island family, the Hawaiian honeycreepers, are in fact finches that have evolved to become nectar eating, with long, narrow curved beaks like sunbirds. And the euphonias, a group of blue and yellow birds that were previously thought to be tanagers, have been moved into the finches as well.

These changes are part of a revolution in taxonomy that has been enabled by DNA testing technology. How Darwin would have loved it.

» The finches pictured are, from top to bottom: siskin, redpoll, goldfinch, chaffinch, brambling, linnet, greenfinch, bullfinch, crossbill and hawfinch.

All the pictures except the goldfinch and the linnet are © Sergey Yeliseev and used under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd licence. The goldfinch is © Isidro Vila Verde and used under a by-nc licence. The linnet is © Ian-S and used under a by-nc-nd licence.