Apps Make Walk In The Country A Tree-T
Schools are back and thoughts of lazy summer sojourns pass to plans for shorter, more active autumn jaunts, woodland walks and moorland meanders.
Those who see trees or hear birds while doing the Countryfile bit, and want to identify them, should have Apps for the jobs on their phone.
Tree ID from the Woodland Trust and Leafsnap UK from the Natural History Museum both set out to adapt facial recognition technology to the business of identifying trees. While Tree ID claims to be able to name a tree from its bark, flowers, fruit or leaves, Leafsnap sticks to the easiest of these, the leaf.
In either case a photo from the phone’s camera can be used to check for a match and, hopefully, name that tree.
Birds are harder to get a good, clean snap of, so the same techniques are unlikely to work well.
Consequently, Warblr and Chirpomatic use the same approach as ‘Name that Tune’ Apps, like Shazam, to identify birdsong.
Unfortunately, these tend not to get great reviews because of the challenge of getting any cleaner a recording of a bird than a photo of it.
This is especially true when birds sing over each other and background noises of wind, traffic, children and other distractions disrupt recordings.
Better, perhaps, to turn to the Collins Bird Guide, the App of the book. This costs much the same as the paper version, but has the bonus of search ability. Feed in details of location, habitat, season, size and/or colour into its sausage machine and out come suggested identifications in richly coloured illustration.
Mind you, a stroll with these Apps can take a lot longer!
