Napa-Solano Audubon Presents: The Internet of Wings with Nathan Pieplow 2-8-24

The Internet of Wings: How the Data Revolution Is About to Change the Way You Bird with Nathan Pieplow:
About the Presentation: What if your phone could pick out rarities for you from a flock of birds? What if it could tell you exactly where an individual migrant came from and where it is going? These technologies already exist, or soon will. In this talk, Nathan Pieplow will discuss how cutting-edge innovations in bird tracking and automatic identification can enhance conservation, supercharge citizen science, and broaden the appeal of birding. You’ll learn how the song of a White-crowned Sparrow communicates not just its species identity, but its street address. You’ll learn what happened when a flock of curlews ran into a snowstorm, and how we know. And you’ll learn how YOU can collect the data needed to reverse declines in bird populations.
About the Presenter: Growing up in South Dakota, Nathan got started identifying bird songs by studying the classic “Birding By Ear” field guides in the Peterson series. It wasn’t until 2003, when he faced the frustrations of studying sounds for his first trips to Mexico and Costa Rica, that he became dedicated to finding new and better ways to learn, describe, and catalog bird sounds. Along the way he became a sound recordist and an amateur ethologist (a student of animal behavior). He’s not one of those superhuman beings who can identify every singing bird, or discern the nocturnal flight call of a Blackpoll Warbler as it passes overhead in the dark. His high-frequency hearing is getting worse every year, and I don’t have a great auditory memory. To learn bird sounds, he wanted more resources: more recordings, better glossaries, deeper discussions. So he set out to create his own resources. These pages are part of the result. The Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds is another part. Nathan lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado. He was a former editor of the quarterly journal Colorado Birds and one of the developers of the Colorado County Birding Website and the Colorado Birding Trail. He regularly gives talks about bird sounds to bird clubs and ornithological societies.