AAAS: "AI can track a single bird over time—based solely on its song," by Julia Vaz.
"Forests across North America have seen a drop in the number of songbirds heralding the arrival of spring." To figure out why, biologists scour forests to capture birds + tag them with leg bands.
"By going back to look for the tagged birds a year later, they can get a picture of how many survive from one year to the next." But the fieldwork takes untold hours, plus capturing + banding can stress the birds.
"A paper published this week in Nature Methods lays out a quicker, gentler approach...uses sound recorders + artificial intelligence (AI) to identify individual birds based on their song alone + track them over time."
"Looking for a better way to track individual birds, machine learning researcher Sam Lapp + colleagues turned to audio + AI...test case was a fist-size migratory songbird called the ovenbird (Seiurus aurocapilla)." Male ovenbirds sing songs composed of a collection of notes that repeat like an alarm, with slight variations from one male to the next.
"To find a way to identify individual birds, Lapp’s team used recordings from more than 100 locations in Pennsylvania made over 4 years...got an AI model to extract features that made songs unique + cluster similar ones together." Each cluster, they hoped, represented songs coming from the same bird.
"They tested the approach with another set of recordings, collected in Canada’s Alberta province by Scott Wilson, who 10 years ago set up a microphone array in an area where he was studying ovenbirds." Wilson’s extensive audio coverage allowed him to trace each song to a particular ovenbird territory, + a specific bird. Lapp ran Wilson’s recordings through his AI model + found it could correctly link songs to individual birds, with up to 96% accuracy.
"One downside is that the method only identifies male ovenbirds...but researchers usually assume every singing male bird has a mate, which allows for a population estimate."
Whether you are a birder or not, everyone should be able to get on board with saving the birds which fill the forest with song.