Those of you familiar with Birdeez will clearly see why this new service was tailored to our demographics. Birds can be designed to carry messages on their bill, head, wings and tail. Once designed, if your bid is high enough, the birds are released into the wild to bring their messages to bird feeders and backyards everywhere.

It’s clear that the Google design team took a lesson from the Birdeez handbook, designing an interface suspiciously similar to the Birdeez bird identification interface.

We hope the next time you’re out birding, you’ll see one of our feathered friends tattooed with our messages. We at Birdeez believe this is the best way to reach the 48 million Americans who bird watch!

Birdeez Team Launching Into Action to Change the World!
Left to Right – Thomas Kuo, Jeff Simeon and Patrick Toerner.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Santa Barbara Audubon Society‘s news letter – El Tecolote for June-July 2013.

If numbers are to be believed, only a quarter of those reading this sentence can identify birds. The US Fish and Wildlife Service reports that 74% of people who watch birds can identify fewer than 20 species by sight. We at Birdeez hope to change that and, in the process, change the world.

Birdeez is an iPhone app, but you can think of it as the un-iBird. Instead of being an encyclopedia, we built Birdeez to be the easiest app for anyone to pick up and start learning local birds. The app knows where you are and what birds are near you at any given time of year.  Enter a bird’s shape, size and color and you’ll get a short list of birds that match. You can even save your bird sightings right in the app. We designed it to help anyone from 7 to 70 years old learn their birds. By connecting more people to the birds around them, we hope to create the next generation of environmental stewards.

When I started at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, I wanted to find an idea to change the world for the better. Joining the Audubon Society in rural Virginia when I was 11, I know my long-term interest in the environment was inspired by my direct observation of birds. I also observed that mobile technology has been changing people’s lives, but unfortunately most people use it to detach even further from the natural world.  At Bren, I began looking for an idea to that would do the opposite––plug people back into nature. Birds seemed like the golden opportunity, and that led to Birdeez.

If Birdeez was hatched at Bren, it was incubated in the Technology Management Program  (TMP) at UCSB. That program and its New Venture Competition gave me the chance to connect with fellow UCSB students Patrick Toerner and Thomas Kuo. Working together, we have what it takes to make this idea a reality. A year ago in May, Birdeez won first place at the New Venture Competition.

Last October at a Silicon Valley event called DEMO, we launched Birdeez. We even won over the tech crowd to be selected as one of the five best presentations at DEMO.

We have a long way to go to change the world, but we’ve certainly started. Since DEMO, Birdeez has been downloaded thousands of times nationwide. We’ve been using it with groups of children to introduce them to the world of birds. We hope you’ll help us by using Birdeez with your kids and grandkids.

Birdeez is available for iPhone at GetBirdeez.com. Let us know what you think and shoot me an email anytime at Jeff@GetBirdeez.com.

Jason Bittel begins with a sentiment we can agree with:

Getting kids into nature is a tough sell today. Inside, we have computers, televisions, video games, and climate control. Outside, there are mosquitoes, sunburn, and poison ivy. Of course, these two worlds are not inherently incompatible, and smartphones are starting to provide a link between them.

After that point, children completely fall out of the article. There are no children with smartphones running amok destroying birds with their apps. The article becomes a discussion over the ethics and environmental impacts of playing bird songs in the field. This is an important issue, one recently highlighted by the Dorset Wildlife Trust regarding the struggling Nightjar which nests in England.

This problem for birds arises because adults play bird songs with apps to attract birds, often to take photos. This disturbs birds’ regular activity, impacts their ability to feed and can be especially harmful for endangered and nesting birds. An important lesson for everyone. But why title this article as a children with apps vs. birds?

Because conflict and accusation sell.

I don’t think we can blame Mr. Bittel for this lying title, as the URL for the article is likely it’s original title: Do_Bird_Song_Apps_Confuse_the_Real_Birds. Seems perfectly reasonable and descriptive of what the content of the article. But one his editor probably didn’t like. “Bird Apps vs. Birds” isn’t as controversial as “Kids with apps vs. Birds”.

If you are tempted to defend the title because of it’s question mark should realize that it isn’t a question but an accusation. It is the same as writing the question “Did [Famous Celebrity] Cheat on [Other Famous Celebrity]?”, where the implied answer is “yes”. If the answer was “no” there would be no story. This is especially important because most people won’t ever read the entire article, instead absorbing the headline and it’s implied answer and moving on. Bird apps, good for children, bad for birds. Kids win, birds lose. But this is just wrong.

Why do we at Birdeez care so much about this lying title?

Because with bird apps like Birdeez both the children and the birds win.

Today it is so hard to get children outside and learning. Schools have drastically cut the budget for anything that doesn’t have to do with state or national standards, including field trips. Additionally, children spend less time outside than at any other time in history, almost none without organized sports. Richard Louv coined the phrase “Nature Deficit Disorder” to describe the problems children experience when they spend little to no time outside.

We believe that Birdeez can help address Nature Deficit Disorder by being an approachable way for parents and children to learn about the natural world. Birdeez is designed to be bird identification for the video game generation; a bird identification app that appeals to digital natives like children growing up with iPhones and iPads at home and school. Apps like Birdeez can nudge children to go outside and learn about the natural environment.

Some of our most rewarding experiences with Birdeez have come by working with kids on with NatureTrack. While taking children on nature focused field trips we give them the app to identify birds. Sue Eisaguirre, founder of NatureTrack, recently said to me “We’ve seen how children really own the identification when they do it themselves with Birdeez instead of only being shown and told the birds.” And we’ve seen this ourselves every time we work with kids.

We believe that Birdeez will help create the next generation of bird lovers, which is essential for the long term health and protection of birds. In order to foster life long interest in the natural environment, we need more kids to have access to applications like Birdeez and programs like NatureTrack, not less. The next generation of bird lovers are needed to carry the torch of bird conservation into the future. These children will be the people who know how to use their apps responsibly to enjoy the birds and protect them for generations.

This is something Jason Bittel and many of the folks at Slate probably agree with, but instead of spreading that message they created a false conflict and mislead their readers hoping to make a headline more clickable.

Think I went too far? Not far enough? Let us know in the comments.