Audio clip
Todd Koym
If birder Todd Koym were in Chattanooga, he said, he’d want to seek out the surf scoter, horned grebe, Virginia rail and brown-headed nuthatch.
Since other birders might have a completely different list of quests, the Virginia software developer — with the help of other experts — created BirdsEye, an application for the iPhone and iTouch.
“The goal is to get people out to see real live birds in a real live world,” said Mr. Koym.
The application combines content from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Academy of Natural Sciences and the knowledge of Kenn Kaufman, a renowned birder and author of the “Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America.”
The app allows users to see where a particular bird has been observed and provides directions. For the new birder or traveling experience birder, it provides a list of breeds seen in the area and a map to birding hot spots in the contiguous 48 states, Alaska and Canada.
BirdsEye also includes — in the $19.99 charge for the app — images and audio for the 470 most frequently observed species in North America. For an additional $19.99, content is available for more elusive birds (and a total of 847 species).
“For beginners, (the 470-bird app) is a very long list,” Mr. Koym said. “For the experienced birder, this will help them with where and how to find the birds. (However,) content and ability to find the birds are two different things.”
Once he became an amateur birder, he said, he began to develop a plan for the application because “I am kind of lazy. I like computers to do the work for me.”
Around his home, he said, he might become fairly knowledgeable about the birds of northern Virginia. When he returned to his native Texas, though, he didn’t know the places to go.
Mr. Koym said he began to turn more and more to e-Bird, a real-time online checklist program of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in which the birding community reports and accesses basic information on bird abundance and distribution.
“It’s the world’s largest citizen science project,” he said. “It’s real data submitted by citizens of the United States — tens of thousands of users” and 1 to 2 million observations per month.
Clint Cooper is the faith editor and a staff writer for the Times Free Press Life section. He also has been an assistant sports editor and Metro staff writer for the newspaper. Prior to the merger between the Chattanooga Free Press and Chattanooga Times in 1999, he was sports news editor for the Chattanooga Free Press, where he was in charge of the day-to-day content of the section and the section’s design. Before becoming sports ...
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