Smithsonian's National Zoo once hosted a fantastic key on their website, for identifying North American birds by sound.
It functioned like a dichotomous key to narrow down search results: first, it asked for the number of notes in a song, and then basic aspects of pitch and tone quality. It was an incredible resource, but it's been taken down, and I'm wondering what the best equivalent might be.
There are several amazing audio repositories that I use, but they're mainly categorized by name/taxonomy, and not qualities of the sound. The Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds seems like exactly what I want, but I can't seem to find a copy of the one for eastern North America! At least that I can afford 😅
I'd really prefer a non-mobile resource if possible, because I only have an old phone that's terrible at running pretty much any app... but do any of the birding apps offer this kind of categorization, perhaps? I'm a bit unclear about what features they have beyond checklists and machine recognition. Surely there is a happy medium between automatic ID and just listening to every local bird recording until you find a match? I'm looking for some kind of aid for manual cross-referencing when I have written notes but no recording. It doesn't need to be a feature of a sound library, even just a separate list of regional birds sorted that way would be helpful.
What would you do to help narrow down your search? Or, what resources do you use, personally?
It functioned like a dichotomous key to narrow down search results: first, it asked for the number of notes in a song, and then basic aspects of pitch and tone quality. It was an incredible resource, but it's been taken down, and I'm wondering what the best equivalent might be.
There are several amazing audio repositories that I use, but they're mainly categorized by name/taxonomy, and not qualities of the sound. The Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds seems like exactly what I want, but I can't seem to find a copy of the one for eastern North America! At least that I can afford 😅
I'd really prefer a non-mobile resource if possible, because I only have an old phone that's terrible at running pretty much any app... but do any of the birding apps offer this kind of categorization, perhaps? I'm a bit unclear about what features they have beyond checklists and machine recognition. Surely there is a happy medium between automatic ID and just listening to every local bird recording until you find a match? I'm looking for some kind of aid for manual cross-referencing when I have written notes but no recording. It doesn't need to be a feature of a sound library, even just a separate list of regional birds sorted that way would be helpful.
What would you do to help narrow down your search? Or, what resources do you use, personally?
