Smart solution to monitoring birds

OLD smartphones could be used to monitor bird behaviour, a new study has found.

Writing for the British Ornithologists’ Union, Ronny Steen, of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, explored how an old iphone could be used to collect video data from a bird feeder.

Using an off-the-shelf app, Videography, which detects motion and triggers automatic video recordings, Steen found the smartphone could effectively be used as advanced scientific equipment.

When a smartphone was compared with 60 minutes of simultaneous filming with a camcorder, the latter recorded 306 bird visits, of which the smartphone missed only three. The cost-effective iphone also immediately backs up footage in a cloud service, and records date and time of the bird visits, speeding up data analysis. Samantha Herbert