A Field Guide for Oaks Bottom, In Your Pocket

Most people walk right past.

A small bird drops into the willows at Oaks Bottom, flicks its tail once, and is gone. You saw it. You could even describe it — brown, a pale stripe over the eye, busy — but you could not name it. And by the time you are home and near a book, the details that would have told you have already gone soft.

I have been photographing this refuge for years. What I wanted was to put what I have learned somewhere it is actually useful: on the trail, in your hand, while the bird is still in the bush.

So that is what I built. Three things, finished this week. They are free, they need no account, and they are made for a phone.

The Oaks Bottom Field Guide

Seventy-three species, every one of them photographed at Oaks Bottom or close by. Each entry has the field marks that actually separate it from the bird it gets confused with, where to look, when to look, and what it sounds like. Twenty-nine of them carry their songs, so you can listen and compare on the spot.

Open it in your phone’s browser and use Add to Home Screen. After that it works with no signal at all — which matters, because the coverage down in the bottom is thin in exactly the places the birds like best.

And the part I am most pleased with: it can listen. Tap the microphone, hold your phone toward the sound, and it will tell you what it heard. It takes about eight seconds.

Two things worth knowing about that. First, it runs on my own server — your recording is never sent to anyone else, and it is deleted the moment it has been analyzed. Second, it is built on BirdNET, the sound-identification model from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and it is not infallible. Wind and traffic confuse it. A distant bird confuses it. But it gets most of them, and the first time it names something you could not see, it is a little uncanny.

Find by Color

For when all you kept was the color. Pick how big it was, pick the main color you remember, and add a second one only if you are sure.

I will be honest about what this one can do. Color alone lands on a single species only about a fifth of the time. A third of these birds are simply gray or brown. So it hands you a shortlist, not an answer — and then you check the field marks. Size and season do most of the real work.

Browse by Group

Birds sorted the way they actually sort themselves: ducks and geese, herons and egrets, hawks and eagles, sparrows and towhees, woodpeckers. Twenty-nine families, each with a photograph.

This is the one I reach for most. Once you know it was a sparrow, you are choosing between six birds instead of seventy-three — and that is a problem you can finish.

The Songbird Quiz

Ten photographs, three names each. It keeps score.

This one has a longer history than the rest. The first version was a little Java program I wrote years ago, and a form of it has been shown at OMSI. It had quietly broken at some point in a move between servers, and fixing it was the best hour of the week. Fair warning: the sparrows will humble you.

What is missing

Plenty. There are birds at Oaks Bottom I have never managed to photograph well, species the guide does not cover yet, and calls I would like to record myself rather than borrow. It will keep growing.

If you use it, tell me what it got wrong, what it could not find, and what you saw that is not in there. That is genuinely useful to me, and it is how the next version gets better.

None of this is mine, really. The refuge does the work — the herons, the kingfisher that stayed, the coots with their ridiculous feet. I just take notes, and I have always thought notes are better when you hand them to somebody else.

Start here: the field guide. Everything else is linked from the menu at the top of Bird Finder.