July 15, 2025 • 23 mins
This week on Best Bets for Pets, Michelle Fern chats with David Mann, founder of Haikubox — the innovative backyard bird listening device that’s revolutionizing birdwatching and conservation. From his childhood birding adventures in Cornell’s Sapsucker Woods to earning a PhD in bioacoustics from MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, David’s lifelong passion for birds has taken flight with Haikubox. Developed with longtime colleague Dr. Holger Klinck at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Haikubox uses cutting-edge passive acoustic monitoring to automatically identify birds by their songs. More than just a high-tech gadget, it’s an educational tool, a citizen science platform, and a conservation initiative all rolled into one. Whether you're a seasoned birder, a curious beginner, or a teacher looking to inspire young minds, tune in to learn how Haikubox is helping people reconnect with nature — one chirp at a time.
EPISODE NOTES: Haikubox: Listening to Nature, One Birdsong at a Time
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EPISODE NOTES: Haikubox: Listening to Nature, One Birdsong at a Time
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Pet Life Radio. Let's Talk Pets.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Hello, cut levers, Welcome to Best Bets for Pets. I'm
your show host, Michelle bern So today is all about
the birds. I don't think we've given birds enough credit
and we don't talk about them enough, at least not
on Best Bets for Pets, and they are truly amazing creatures.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
My guest today has the most one of the most
clever products I have seen in a long time, and
I'm excited to tell you all about it and have
them on the show. So stay tuned, We'll be right back.
Speaker 4 (00:56):
You know the expression cats have nine lives? Well, what
if you can give them one more? But give them ten?
Movement is on a mission to help give cats an
extra life. How with spee and Neoter, Spain or nootering
your cat helps them live a longer, healthier life and
it helps control free rolling cat populations too. Learn more
(01:19):
about the benefits of spee and Neoter and meet Scooter,
the neuter cat at Give Them ten dot Org. That's
give them ten dot Org.
Speaker 5 (01:32):
Let's talk bets on Petlife Radio dot com.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Welcome back everyone. I'd like to welcome Davidman from Hi
Kubox Welcome David, and you are the creator, correct.
Speaker 6 (01:53):
Yes, I am and part of the team that created it.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
Welcome so much to best Bets for pets.
Speaker 6 (01:57):
Thanks, great to be.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
Here, great to have. So what is Haiku box?
Speaker 6 (02:03):
So hi Kubox is a device that you plug in
in your backyard to listen for birds, and it's listening
all the time. And what it does is it's listening
for the particular songs that different bird species make, so
it can tell cardinals apart from blue jays, apart from
matt catchers. And then it'll give you a summary every
(02:24):
day of all of the birds that heard, little sound
clips that you can listen to. It can give you alert,
like if it's a bald eagle, it detects, it can
give you an alert and you can run outside and
go try to find it.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Okay. Thanks your background. You're a bird lover from the
time you were really small, really young, right.
Speaker 6 (02:42):
Yeah, that's right when I was really young. So I
grew up in central New York. We're in Florida now,
and I used to go bird watching a lot when
I was like eight years old and didn't know it
at the time, but we were trespassing all the time
to go birdwatching. So, yeah, I've been doing bird watching
for a long time, but my background is really as
(03:02):
a scientist and a marine biologist, and so I've been
studying sounds underwater for about thirty years.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Wow.
Speaker 6 (03:11):
And so hai Kuba's kind of actually grew out of
a collaboration with a colleague of mine who also did
underwater work, but was at the corner of lab of
pornithology where they studied birds a lot.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
So I haven't a wonderfully new appreciation for birds having
watched and I'm not associated with this at all. Haven't
watched a program that was just on Call the Americas.
Did you see it?
Speaker 6 (03:35):
I have not. I've saw the previews for it. I
haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Okay, there are birds. They talk about different types of animals,
from large mammals to sea creatures, to insects to birds,
and it's incredible the sounds and the way birds do
their mating calls, mating dances, and a lot of that
was in the different episodes of The Americas, which you
(04:00):
would love it from your background, you would definitely love it.
But they're fascinating creatures. What is it about birds that
makes people excited? About birds.
Speaker 6 (04:10):
You know, I think birds are one of the animals
that are part of everyone's you know, daily existence, apart
from their pets. So it's I think the animals that
people have the most experienced with with wild animals, and
they're seasonal, so they're you know, this is in May,
and so they're starting to migrate north. Many species up
(04:31):
from Central and South America and so there's like, oh,
you know, these warblers showed up and so it's a
harbinger spring. Yeah. So I think it's something that people
have a lot of contact with and they make up
a big part of all of you know, the interesting
sounds that we hear when we're outside.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Okay, thanks, And where did the name haiku box come from?
I know the box part, but haiku.
Speaker 6 (04:53):
So Haiku is a Japanese poetry style, and we chose
that name because haiku poems tend to involve nature and
also things changing, so like changing of the seasons and
what animals do as those seasons change. And our goal
is actually to not only detect birds, but we're also
working on detecting dog sounds and other types of animal sounds.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Okay, and how does the hikup box work?
Speaker 6 (05:21):
So it has a microphone and a little computer inside,
and so the microphone is recording the sound, and it
turns the sound into an image like a picture, and
then it uses these AI neural nets that you've all
heard of to look at that image of the sound
(05:42):
and determine what it is from a huge library that
was trained originally by folks from the Cornell University LABA Pornithology.
So it's the same way like on your phone, it
will organize like your dog photos in one thing and
your cat photos and another folder. Automatically. We're doing the
same thing, but we're actually doing it with images of sound.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
Okay, images of sound. So, and this might be relatable
for people listening like myself that are not scientists. Does
it work a little bit? Like I'm just trying to
relate it to something that we're all familiar with, like
how Shazam works for hearing songs.
Speaker 6 (06:20):
Yes and no, okay okay, so like similarly the technology
behind Shazam, but at least when it first came out,
I'm not sure what they're doing. Now you had a
library of known like songs, it would have to classify
and so the way it was figuring out exactly which
one you were listening to from a short clip is
a little bit different from how we work. So it's
(06:40):
more like if you're trying to I'll forget into two parts.
One is like, how do you make an image of sound?
And so the way that works is you break apart
the different frequencies. So you might have low frequencies in
high frequencies and you separate those in an image. And
then and that's sort of the vertical part of the image.
And then time is going across. And so we have
(07:02):
these three second clips that we'll take and we'll turn
those into an image. So Cornell for decades has colected
a library of recordings of known bird species. So they
have thousands of recordings from thousands of different species of birds.
And so you know, not all birds make the same
song even all the time, Like cardinals have many different
(07:24):
kinds of songs they sing, so they'll have many, many
examples of the different kinds of songs from cardinals from
all over the US. They make images of these and
then basically you train the neural network is looking at them,
and it's basically saying, oh, you train it to recognize
the particular features that say Oh, that's a cardinal. So
(07:45):
I don't know if that really answers your question.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Yeah, this is fascinating.
Speaker 6 (07:48):
It's much much more.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Sophisticated technology than shizam. So it not only recognizes the sound,
but it identifies the actual bird. Then you have something
called bird alert. What is that?
Speaker 6 (08:04):
So the bird alerts are so the system is connected
to a cloud service. And so basically if you have,
for example, like right now, a lot of birds are
migrating through the US from south to north, and so
if it here is a bird that it hasn't heard
in the past week, a bunch of times it'll say, hey,
you have a new bird alert and it's like, oh,
(08:25):
we just detected black and white warpler. And then so
you're then aware of kind of what's coming through. A
lot of birds don't hang out, so I can I
have embarrassing stories to tell. So I've lived in Florida
for like twenty five years.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
That's interesting.
Speaker 6 (08:42):
Yeah, well, I've lived here in Florida for twenty five years.
And there's a bird called the cedar waxwing that is
actually fairly common and I'd never seen one. And when
I was a kid, there was a picture of one on,
you know, one of the front of my birding books,
and I was like, I've never seen that. They must
be really hard to find. And as soon as we
built the first taike Ku box and we're testing it here,
(09:04):
I was getting alerts that, oh, there's cedar waxwings here,
and I was like, Oh, they're not. I've lived here
for twenty five years. I've never seen one. And then
finally I just I went outside and I looked up
and there was like fifteen of them in the tree
in my front yard.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Wow.
Speaker 6 (09:18):
But they only stay there for like two minutes. So
it turns out it's also a great way to learn
the different songs and calls that birds make. So for
cedar waxwing, they have really high pitched sound that most
people probably would ignore. But once you hear it and
learn it, then you when you hear that again, you know, oh,
there's a flock of cedar waxings nearby.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Wow. What about like sometimes in the evening there's some birds.
I hear a loud bird sound all the time and
I haven't identified what it is, So what about the loudness?
Does that make a difference with haikubox? Does it pick
up at least channel sounds as well as like the
loud you know, whatever sounds s you.
Speaker 6 (10:00):
Might be like an owl. Lots of different owls, especially
at dusk, will produce loud sounds, so it's much easier
for it to identify loud sounds than quiet ones. But
it actually does barely well even with quiet sounds. Oh,
the other thing was going to point out, there's there's
a really cool app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
called Merlin that uses a similar technology that runs as
(10:23):
an app on your phone. So when you hear that
bird outside that's really loud at night, you want to
go find out what it is. If you open Merlin
and go outside, it will listen for it and tell you.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
So it's called Merlin, like Merlin. Yeah, wasn't that a
magician or something?
Speaker 6 (10:39):
Yes? Okay, And there's a bird called the Merlin.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
And then there's the Marlin, which.
Speaker 6 (10:43):
Is Marlin's a fish. But yeah, there's a Merlin at
the Bird basedball team.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
I think, I don't know if they're doing that good
in Florida, but right.
Speaker 6 (10:51):
Marlins Marlin they're doing okay.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
See that's why you don't know. We don't know about them.
But I figured him back in my head. Yep, there
because bird based in too. We're going to take a
quick break and we're going to talk with David Moore
about the high Kupbox. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
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Speaker 1 (11:30):
Let's Talk pass Let's Talk Pets on pet Life Radio,
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Speaker 8 (11:35):
Pet live Radio dot com.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Welcome back everyone. We're talking to David Mann. He is
part of the team that created the high coup Box,
which identifies birds sounds with AI technology and it's really fascinating.
And David, so let's talk about say, if someone always
want to have a pet. It's hard to have a
(12:07):
pet if you have certain allergies or where you live.
But observing birds, I mean it's it's kind of in
a way like having a pet. They're just not in
your house.
Speaker 6 (12:17):
Yeah, certainly it can be.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
So how would someone get started with the hikup Box.
It's in the shape of like almost about size of
a cell phone.
Speaker 6 (12:26):
Yeah, it's a bit bigger. Yeah, So you you have
to plug it in outside and hang it up and
then you connect it to your WiFi and after that
you don't have to do anything. And so there's there's
a phone app and there's a website that you can
go to to look at the recordings and detections that
are coming in and you can also so we have
a few thousand of them running around the world right now,
(12:46):
and there's there's a map on the website and app
that you can go to, and if people have their
high coup boxes public, you can go see what they're
detecting as well.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Wow, that's pretty incredible. Yes, What are some of the
benefits of LIT to birds getting into bird watching? Because
we have a lot of people that are you know,
on the show, they probably have a cat or dog
or or lizard or something and birds. We have people
that have birds, of course, but I mean we have
a wide audience. Let's talk about it or into birds.
What are some of the benefits.
Speaker 6 (13:16):
So it's like a benefit of a dog, like so
we have a beautiful blue tick coonhound and she actually
gets us outside probably more than we would, and she
gets us walking around. And I think birds can do
the same thing as well. Once you start paying attention
to even the common birds, like the blue jays and
the cardinals, they're just really cool and they, you know,
(13:37):
they'll do funny things. If you even get you know,
get a bird feeder in your backyard, you can start
paying attention. Like blue jays will imitate the calls of
hawks to try to scare other birds away, and so
as you just pay attention to them, even if it's
like a few minutes a day, you can kind of
learn what their habits are and kind of like the
things that they do, and like what the really smart
(13:58):
ones do and the ones that are enough quite as smart.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
As in any species you have a little What about
other noises you mentioned said you said that frogs will
be picked up, probably.
Speaker 6 (14:09):
Ducks, Yeah, frogs, ducks, coyotes.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
Raccoons do. Raccoons make noises.
Speaker 6 (14:15):
Raccoons do make noises, at least when you're like handling them.
I don't know, they don't make sound a lot squirrels do.
Part of the reason we need to know what the
other animals are making is that sometimes those animals sounds
will sound like a bird, and so we have to
tell them apart. So definitely coyotes and frogs are pretty big.
(14:37):
And obviously insects.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
Coyotes, frogs and insects.
Speaker 6 (14:41):
Oh yeah, plenty of Yeah, cicadas, So cicadas get going.
They're very loud, they'll call continuously. Crickets, katie DIDs.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
But it only identifies birds right now.
Speaker 6 (14:52):
Yeah, we only show you birds. We identify dogs barking,
but we we don't share that information.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
I just ask that. But just as this side note,
I don't know why someone want to hear dogs barking.
That's not as pleasant as hearing birds. But could you
identify if you wanted to do a box you know
something with dogs. Identify dogs by their bark.
Speaker 6 (15:13):
Yeah, minimally the size, but probably also the breed to
some extent. So our coon hound has a wonderful houndish
howl that she lets out when she's happy, and so
she's actually trained in kubox data set so that we
know it's a dog. But there are some dogs, you know,
people will contact us and go, my dog's getting you know,
(15:34):
classified as a great blue heron, and it's oh wow.
A lot of the waiting birds have kind of barkie
like sounds that they make, and so that's why it
will happen, and so it's pretty funny when that happens.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
Does hikubox identify if say a bird was in.
Speaker 6 (15:50):
Distress, Well, the short answers no, what about distance? So
we only sort of know distance by how loud it is.
But different species are also sing at different levels, So
some are extremely loud and you can hear them really
far away, and then others aren't as loud. So yeah,
the things that we would love to be able to
do but we can't quite do now are actually get
(16:13):
an estimate of how many birds are calling. We can
tell you how many different species are calling and how
often we hear calls, but we don't know if it's
say one cardinal or five cardinals in your yard.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
Oh interesting, So David, let's talk about Also when you
hear the haiku box on your website, it says, chances
are the bird is right outside. So as far as
distance is the bird generally close enough that you could
see the bird or you'd have to get I mean
with bird binoculars of course, looking in the trees and
all over. Or is it just you know, if you
(16:48):
don't move in two minutes, you're not going to see
the bird.
Speaker 6 (16:50):
It depends on the bird a lot. So yeah, usually
it's you know, it's within one hundred feet of the
hiku box. But there are other birds, for example, like
the and bald eagle. They're going to be really high
in the sky. You pick those up from very far away.
Another one is like a swallowtail kites, which again is
kind of flying around and moves pretty fast. So if
(17:13):
you get a detection on those generally and you want
to see it, you go outside right away.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
You know, I just thought about something. I don't think
you'd classify it as a bird, but I'm not really sure.
What about bats?
Speaker 6 (17:23):
Oh? Bats? Bats are super interesting. So that's our mammal see.
Oh yeah, so they're a mammal. They give birth to young,
and so they are generally coming out at night and
usually you can't hear them, but they're making a ton
of sound. So that's will echo locate because they're flying
(17:44):
around in the dark, and so they'll emit kind of
a sonar like signal, very high pitch or very high
pitch like above our hearing range that will bounce off trees, insects, houses,
the ground so that they can tell what's going on
around them, and so they're primarily eating insects, so they're basically,
(18:05):
you know, trying to figure those things out. So our
current hikubox can't do bats because our microphone doesn't go
to the frequencies of sound that they make. But we
are looking at maybe making a supercharged version that can
do both birds and bats.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
That's pretty cool. That was maybe my next question. And
I have no idea why bats flew into my head,
but you know, just one of those things.
Speaker 6 (18:27):
Oh, it's a good one. No, they are totally reliant
on sound for getting around and so, and they are
allowed except you can't hear you can't hear them, right,
So they're allowed to each other.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
It's an amazing world out there.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
You know.
Speaker 6 (18:40):
It is, yeah, that you don't even know.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
About, and even things you know, I know we're talking
about birds, but you know what, do you have a
lot in South Florida? Ducks everywhere? Right, Yes, signs of ducks.
Ducks they crossed the road. You see all the cars
are stopped. Why okay, there was a duck in its
little Chicki's going across which happens a lot. But you know,
they're really smart ducks you could talk to they kind
(19:04):
of seem to I don't know much about ducks, but
they seem to like shake their booty is if they're
like wagging their tail.
Speaker 6 (19:12):
Right.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
And birds like I was talking about earlier from the
Americas are just that show. The Americas are just amazingly creatures.
What would you like to do next besides bats and birds?
What would you like to do for have the High
Coupbox be able to do say in five years?
Speaker 6 (19:29):
Oh well five years ideally we could do everything that's
common that's making sound would be very cool. So one
of the things that we're doing because we have a network, right,
so we have thousands of these out there, is actually
you can see when different species are migrating and kind
of get that larger view of what's going on. We
did a fun study on the eclipse that was about
(19:53):
a year ago, looking to see what the birds did
during totality. So this is the one that went from
like Texas kind to New York for mont mean in Canada.
So a lot of the birds got quiet, like after
it got dark, but you had to be like in
the zone of totality, not even at the edge for
that to happen. That was a cool fun thing to
(20:16):
look at as well. So one of the things that
we'd really like to do is to be able to
analyze a lot of the data that we have. So
we have over a billion recordings and so there's lots
and lots of fun things you can look at. You
can look at dialects in species, like does the the
sparrow in this part of the country sound different than
(20:37):
the sparrow in that part of the country.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Why would that happen?
Speaker 6 (20:40):
So most songbirds have a learned song that they kind
of partly learning from their parent who or the other
birds around the act as tutors, and so if you
have birds in different places, those things can kind of drift.
There may be selective pressures for having certain kinds of
songs as well, because they're often typically it's a male
(21:03):
songbird singing and trying to attract a female to mate with,
and so he may be being selected by the female
for a particular type of song as well.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Yeah, pretty incredible. And where can people buy hi kubox.
Speaker 6 (21:16):
You can buy it on Amazon dot Com or you
can also buy it from our website hikubox dot com.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
And people can also find out other things on your site.
What are some of the things they can also learn
on your site.
Speaker 6 (21:29):
So we have sort of two websites. We have the
the hikerbox dot com website is you know, where you
can buy the hikubox and you can learn about you know,
what other people's experiences with it have been. There's a
whole bunch of resources. We have a weekly newsletter that
you can subscribe to you don't have to own a
hikubox that kind of looks at history of studying birds
(21:51):
and cool interesting facts about different species that comes out
every week. So yeah, there's a lot of great resources
there too, Okay, And your other website is so the
other website is if you have a haiku box, it'll
show you a map of all the hiku boxes in
the world. So if you want to go, like, you know,
look at one in a different part of the country
(22:12):
or I just noticed we had one in no Malaska
and you can go click on it and see what
birds are detecting there and what they sound like. And
you can also obviously look at the birds that you're
haiku box is detecting as well. I should say, you
actually don't need to buy a hiku box to use
that website as well. You can just play around with
it and see what's.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Going on, okay and learn about birds. Yeah, okay, Well, David,
I want to thank you so much for coming on
Best Beds for Pets and teaching us more about birds
and as well as.
Speaker 6 (22:42):
The hikup box awesome. Thanks so much, Michelle.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
I hope you all enjoyed the show. If you like
birds or sounds technology, check out haiku box. It is
amazing on the birds that you hear and it's hikubox
dot com, so be sure to check it out. Be
sure to check out haiku Box. I want to thank
my guest David Mann for coming on Best Bets for
Pets thanks to my career which okay ironically they're cat slash, Dennis,
(23:08):
Charlotte and Mollie. They're my inspiration while I listen to
the birds. They like to watch the birds. They don't
top them. They're in their cadgo. And of course thanks
to everybody listening to Best Bets for Pets. I appreciate
your listenership so much, and of course the show would
not be the same without the magic of my producer,
Mark winter Mark, thank you so much for all you do,
and remember you never know what you're going to have next.
(23:31):
On Best Bets for Patsy
Speaker 5 (23:33):
Let's talk bets every week on demand only on petlife
Radio dot com.
This is Pet Life Radio. Let's Talk Pets.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Hello, cut levers, Welcome to Best Bets for Pets. I'm
your show host, Michelle bern So today is all about
the birds. I don't think we've given birds enough credit
and we don't talk about them enough, at least not
on Best Bets for Pets, and they are truly amazing creatures.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
My guest today has the most one of the most
clever products I have seen in a long time, and
I'm excited to tell you all about it and have
them on the show. So stay tuned, We'll be right back.
Speaker 4 (00:56):
You know the expression cats have nine lives? Well, what
if you can give them one more? But give them ten?
Movement is on a mission to help give cats an
extra life. How with spee and Neoter, Spain or nootering
your cat helps them live a longer, healthier life and
it helps control free rolling cat populations too. Learn more
(01:19):
about the benefits of spee and Neoter and meet Scooter,
the neuter cat at Give Them ten dot Org. That's
give them ten dot Org.
Speaker 5 (01:32):
Let's talk bets on Petlife Radio dot com.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Welcome back everyone. I'd like to welcome Davidman from Hi
Kubox Welcome David, and you are the creator, correct.
Speaker 6 (01:53):
Yes, I am and part of the team that created it.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
Welcome so much to best Bets for pets.
Speaker 6 (01:57):
Thanks, great to be.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
Here, great to have. So what is Haiku box?
Speaker 6 (02:03):
So hi Kubox is a device that you plug in
in your backyard to listen for birds, and it's listening
all the time. And what it does is it's listening
for the particular songs that different bird species make, so
it can tell cardinals apart from blue jays, apart from
matt catchers. And then it'll give you a summary every
(02:24):
day of all of the birds that heard, little sound
clips that you can listen to. It can give you alert,
like if it's a bald eagle, it detects, it can
give you an alert and you can run outside and
go try to find it.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Okay. Thanks your background. You're a bird lover from the
time you were really small, really young, right.
Speaker 6 (02:42):
Yeah, that's right when I was really young. So I
grew up in central New York. We're in Florida now,
and I used to go bird watching a lot when
I was like eight years old and didn't know it
at the time, but we were trespassing all the time
to go birdwatching. So, yeah, I've been doing bird watching
for a long time, but my background is really as
(03:02):
a scientist and a marine biologist, and so I've been
studying sounds underwater for about thirty years.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Wow.
Speaker 6 (03:11):
And so hai Kuba's kind of actually grew out of
a collaboration with a colleague of mine who also did
underwater work, but was at the corner of lab of
pornithology where they studied birds a lot.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
So I haven't a wonderfully new appreciation for birds having
watched and I'm not associated with this at all. Haven't
watched a program that was just on Call the Americas.
Did you see it?
Speaker 6 (03:35):
I have not. I've saw the previews for it. I
haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Okay, there are birds. They talk about different types of animals,
from large mammals to sea creatures, to insects to birds,
and it's incredible the sounds and the way birds do
their mating calls, mating dances, and a lot of that
was in the different episodes of The Americas, which you
(04:00):
would love it from your background, you would definitely love it.
But they're fascinating creatures. What is it about birds that
makes people excited? About birds.
Speaker 6 (04:10):
You know, I think birds are one of the animals
that are part of everyone's you know, daily existence, apart
from their pets. So it's I think the animals that
people have the most experienced with with wild animals, and
they're seasonal, so they're you know, this is in May,
and so they're starting to migrate north. Many species up
(04:31):
from Central and South America and so there's like, oh,
you know, these warblers showed up and so it's a
harbinger spring. Yeah. So I think it's something that people
have a lot of contact with and they make up
a big part of all of you know, the interesting
sounds that we hear when we're outside.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Okay, thanks, And where did the name haiku box come from?
I know the box part, but haiku.
Speaker 6 (04:53):
So Haiku is a Japanese poetry style, and we chose
that name because haiku poems tend to involve nature and
also things changing, so like changing of the seasons and
what animals do as those seasons change. And our goal
is actually to not only detect birds, but we're also
working on detecting dog sounds and other types of animal sounds.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Okay, and how does the hikup box work?
Speaker 6 (05:21):
So it has a microphone and a little computer inside,
and so the microphone is recording the sound, and it
turns the sound into an image like a picture, and
then it uses these AI neural nets that you've all
heard of to look at that image of the sound
(05:42):
and determine what it is from a huge library that
was trained originally by folks from the Cornell University LABA Pornithology.
So it's the same way like on your phone, it
will organize like your dog photos in one thing and
your cat photos and another folder. Automatically. We're doing the
same thing, but we're actually doing it with images of sound.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
Okay, images of sound. So, and this might be relatable
for people listening like myself that are not scientists. Does
it work a little bit? Like I'm just trying to
relate it to something that we're all familiar with, like
how Shazam works for hearing songs.
Speaker 6 (06:20):
Yes and no, okay okay, so like similarly the technology
behind Shazam, but at least when it first came out,
I'm not sure what they're doing. Now you had a
library of known like songs, it would have to classify
and so the way it was figuring out exactly which
one you were listening to from a short clip is
a little bit different from how we work. So it's
(06:40):
more like if you're trying to I'll forget into two parts.
One is like, how do you make an image of sound?
And so the way that works is you break apart
the different frequencies. So you might have low frequencies in
high frequencies and you separate those in an image. And
then and that's sort of the vertical part of the image.
And then time is going across. And so we have
(07:02):
these three second clips that we'll take and we'll turn
those into an image. So Cornell for decades has colected
a library of recordings of known bird species. So they
have thousands of recordings from thousands of different species of birds.
And so you know, not all birds make the same
song even all the time, Like cardinals have many different
(07:24):
kinds of songs they sing, so they'll have many, many
examples of the different kinds of songs from cardinals from
all over the US. They make images of these and
then basically you train the neural network is looking at them,
and it's basically saying, oh, you train it to recognize
the particular features that say Oh, that's a cardinal. So
(07:45):
I don't know if that really answers your question.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Yeah, this is fascinating.
Speaker 6 (07:48):
It's much much more.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Sophisticated technology than shizam. So it not only recognizes the sound,
but it identifies the actual bird. Then you have something
called bird alert. What is that?
Speaker 6 (08:04):
So the bird alerts are so the system is connected
to a cloud service. And so basically if you have,
for example, like right now, a lot of birds are
migrating through the US from south to north, and so
if it here is a bird that it hasn't heard
in the past week, a bunch of times it'll say, hey,
you have a new bird alert and it's like, oh,
(08:25):
we just detected black and white warpler. And then so
you're then aware of kind of what's coming through. A
lot of birds don't hang out, so I can I
have embarrassing stories to tell. So I've lived in Florida
for like twenty five years.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
That's interesting.
Speaker 6 (08:42):
Yeah, well, I've lived here in Florida for twenty five years.
And there's a bird called the cedar waxwing that is
actually fairly common and I'd never seen one. And when
I was a kid, there was a picture of one on,
you know, one of the front of my birding books,
and I was like, I've never seen that. They must
be really hard to find. And as soon as we
built the first taike Ku box and we're testing it here,
(09:04):
I was getting alerts that, oh, there's cedar waxwings here,
and I was like, Oh, they're not. I've lived here
for twenty five years. I've never seen one. And then
finally I just I went outside and I looked up
and there was like fifteen of them in the tree
in my front yard.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Wow.
Speaker 6 (09:18):
But they only stay there for like two minutes. So
it turns out it's also a great way to learn
the different songs and calls that birds make. So for
cedar waxwing, they have really high pitched sound that most
people probably would ignore. But once you hear it and
learn it, then you when you hear that again, you know, oh,
there's a flock of cedar waxings nearby.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Wow. What about like sometimes in the evening there's some birds.
I hear a loud bird sound all the time and
I haven't identified what it is, So what about the loudness?
Does that make a difference with haikubox? Does it pick
up at least channel sounds as well as like the
loud you know, whatever sounds s you.
Speaker 6 (10:00):
Might be like an owl. Lots of different owls, especially
at dusk, will produce loud sounds, so it's much easier
for it to identify loud sounds than quiet ones. But
it actually does barely well even with quiet sounds. Oh,
the other thing was going to point out, there's there's
a really cool app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
called Merlin that uses a similar technology that runs as
(10:23):
an app on your phone. So when you hear that
bird outside that's really loud at night, you want to
go find out what it is. If you open Merlin
and go outside, it will listen for it and tell you.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
So it's called Merlin, like Merlin. Yeah, wasn't that a
magician or something?
Speaker 6 (10:39):
Yes? Okay, And there's a bird called the Merlin.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
And then there's the Marlin, which.
Speaker 6 (10:43):
Is Marlin's a fish. But yeah, there's a Merlin at
the Bird basedball team.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
I think, I don't know if they're doing that good
in Florida, but right.
Speaker 6 (10:51):
Marlins Marlin they're doing okay.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
See that's why you don't know. We don't know about them.
But I figured him back in my head. Yep, there
because bird based in too. We're going to take a
quick break and we're going to talk with David Moore
about the high Kupbox. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Thank you to hear more of your favorite show, Hopeful.
Speaker 7 (11:11):
Episodes of all our shows are available on demand. Go
to petlife Radio dot com to feed our entire lineup
of possom pet podcasts. Also dig us up in iHeartRadio
and iTunes. Let's Talk Pats live and demand only from
pet Life Radio.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Let's Talk pass Let's Talk Pets on pet Life Radio,
HETLFE Radio.
Speaker 8 (11:35):
Pet live Radio dot com.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Welcome back everyone. We're talking to David Mann. He is
part of the team that created the high coup Box,
which identifies birds sounds with AI technology and it's really fascinating.
And David, so let's talk about say, if someone always
want to have a pet. It's hard to have a
(12:07):
pet if you have certain allergies or where you live.
But observing birds, I mean it's it's kind of in
a way like having a pet. They're just not in
your house.
Speaker 6 (12:17):
Yeah, certainly it can be.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
So how would someone get started with the hikup Box.
It's in the shape of like almost about size of
a cell phone.
Speaker 6 (12:26):
Yeah, it's a bit bigger. Yeah, So you you have
to plug it in outside and hang it up and
then you connect it to your WiFi and after that
you don't have to do anything. And so there's there's
a phone app and there's a website that you can
go to to look at the recordings and detections that
are coming in and you can also so we have
a few thousand of them running around the world right now,
(12:46):
and there's there's a map on the website and app
that you can go to, and if people have their
high coup boxes public, you can go see what they're
detecting as well.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Wow, that's pretty incredible. Yes, What are some of the
benefits of LIT to birds getting into bird watching? Because
we have a lot of people that are you know,
on the show, they probably have a cat or dog
or or lizard or something and birds. We have people
that have birds, of course, but I mean we have
a wide audience. Let's talk about it or into birds.
What are some of the benefits.
Speaker 6 (13:16):
So it's like a benefit of a dog, like so
we have a beautiful blue tick coonhound and she actually
gets us outside probably more than we would, and she
gets us walking around. And I think birds can do
the same thing as well. Once you start paying attention
to even the common birds, like the blue jays and
the cardinals, they're just really cool and they, you know,
(13:37):
they'll do funny things. If you even get you know,
get a bird feeder in your backyard, you can start
paying attention. Like blue jays will imitate the calls of
hawks to try to scare other birds away, and so
as you just pay attention to them, even if it's
like a few minutes a day, you can kind of
learn what their habits are and kind of like the
things that they do, and like what the really smart
(13:58):
ones do and the ones that are enough quite as smart.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
As in any species you have a little What about
other noises you mentioned said you said that frogs will
be picked up, probably.
Speaker 6 (14:09):
Ducks, Yeah, frogs, ducks, coyotes.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
Raccoons do. Raccoons make noises.
Speaker 6 (14:15):
Raccoons do make noises, at least when you're like handling them.
I don't know, they don't make sound a lot squirrels do.
Part of the reason we need to know what the
other animals are making is that sometimes those animals sounds
will sound like a bird, and so we have to
tell them apart. So definitely coyotes and frogs are pretty big.
(14:37):
And obviously insects.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
Coyotes, frogs and insects.
Speaker 6 (14:41):
Oh yeah, plenty of Yeah, cicadas, So cicadas get going.
They're very loud, they'll call continuously. Crickets, katie DIDs.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
But it only identifies birds right now.
Speaker 6 (14:52):
Yeah, we only show you birds. We identify dogs barking,
but we we don't share that information.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
I just ask that. But just as this side note,
I don't know why someone want to hear dogs barking.
That's not as pleasant as hearing birds. But could you
identify if you wanted to do a box you know
something with dogs. Identify dogs by their bark.
Speaker 6 (15:13):
Yeah, minimally the size, but probably also the breed to
some extent. So our coon hound has a wonderful houndish
howl that she lets out when she's happy, and so
she's actually trained in kubox data set so that we
know it's a dog. But there are some dogs, you know,
people will contact us and go, my dog's getting you know,
(15:34):
classified as a great blue heron, and it's oh wow.
A lot of the waiting birds have kind of barkie
like sounds that they make, and so that's why it
will happen, and so it's pretty funny when that happens.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
Does hikubox identify if say a bird was in.
Speaker 6 (15:50):
Distress, Well, the short answers no, what about distance? So
we only sort of know distance by how loud it is.
But different species are also sing at different levels, So
some are extremely loud and you can hear them really
far away, and then others aren't as loud. So yeah,
the things that we would love to be able to
do but we can't quite do now are actually get
(16:13):
an estimate of how many birds are calling. We can
tell you how many different species are calling and how
often we hear calls, but we don't know if it's
say one cardinal or five cardinals in your yard.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
Oh interesting, So David, let's talk about Also when you
hear the haiku box on your website, it says, chances
are the bird is right outside. So as far as
distance is the bird generally close enough that you could
see the bird or you'd have to get I mean
with bird binoculars of course, looking in the trees and
all over. Or is it just you know, if you
(16:48):
don't move in two minutes, you're not going to see
the bird.
Speaker 6 (16:50):
It depends on the bird a lot. So yeah, usually
it's you know, it's within one hundred feet of the
hiku box. But there are other birds, for example, like
the and bald eagle. They're going to be really high
in the sky. You pick those up from very far away.
Another one is like a swallowtail kites, which again is
kind of flying around and moves pretty fast. So if
(17:13):
you get a detection on those generally and you want
to see it, you go outside right away.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
You know, I just thought about something. I don't think
you'd classify it as a bird, but I'm not really sure.
What about bats?
Speaker 6 (17:23):
Oh? Bats? Bats are super interesting. So that's our mammal see.
Oh yeah, so they're a mammal. They give birth to young,
and so they are generally coming out at night and
usually you can't hear them, but they're making a ton
of sound. So that's will echo locate because they're flying
(17:44):
around in the dark, and so they'll emit kind of
a sonar like signal, very high pitch or very high
pitch like above our hearing range that will bounce off trees, insects, houses,
the ground so that they can tell what's going on
around them, and so they're primarily eating insects, so they're basically,
(18:05):
you know, trying to figure those things out. So our
current hikubox can't do bats because our microphone doesn't go
to the frequencies of sound that they make. But we
are looking at maybe making a supercharged version that can
do both birds and bats.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
That's pretty cool. That was maybe my next question. And
I have no idea why bats flew into my head,
but you know, just one of those things.
Speaker 6 (18:27):
Oh, it's a good one. No, they are totally reliant
on sound for getting around and so, and they are
allowed except you can't hear you can't hear them, right,
So they're allowed to each other.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
It's an amazing world out there.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
You know.
Speaker 6 (18:40):
It is, yeah, that you don't even know.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
About, and even things you know, I know we're talking
about birds, but you know what, do you have a
lot in South Florida? Ducks everywhere? Right, Yes, signs of ducks.
Ducks they crossed the road. You see all the cars
are stopped. Why okay, there was a duck in its
little Chicki's going across which happens a lot. But you know,
they're really smart ducks you could talk to they kind
(19:04):
of seem to I don't know much about ducks, but
they seem to like shake their booty is if they're
like wagging their tail.
Speaker 6 (19:12):
Right.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
And birds like I was talking about earlier from the
Americas are just that show. The Americas are just amazingly creatures.
What would you like to do next besides bats and birds?
What would you like to do for have the High
Coupbox be able to do say in five years?
Speaker 6 (19:29):
Oh well five years ideally we could do everything that's
common that's making sound would be very cool. So one
of the things that we're doing because we have a network, right,
so we have thousands of these out there, is actually
you can see when different species are migrating and kind
of get that larger view of what's going on. We
did a fun study on the eclipse that was about
(19:53):
a year ago, looking to see what the birds did
during totality. So this is the one that went from
like Texas kind to New York for mont mean in Canada.
So a lot of the birds got quiet, like after
it got dark, but you had to be like in
the zone of totality, not even at the edge for
that to happen. That was a cool fun thing to
(20:16):
look at as well. So one of the things that
we'd really like to do is to be able to
analyze a lot of the data that we have. So
we have over a billion recordings and so there's lots
and lots of fun things you can look at. You
can look at dialects in species, like does the the
sparrow in this part of the country sound different than
(20:37):
the sparrow in that part of the country.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Why would that happen?
Speaker 6 (20:40):
So most songbirds have a learned song that they kind
of partly learning from their parent who or the other
birds around the act as tutors, and so if you
have birds in different places, those things can kind of drift.
There may be selective pressures for having certain kinds of
songs as well, because they're often typically it's a male
(21:03):
songbird singing and trying to attract a female to mate with,
and so he may be being selected by the female
for a particular type of song as well.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Yeah, pretty incredible. And where can people buy hi kubox.
Speaker 6 (21:16):
You can buy it on Amazon dot Com or you
can also buy it from our website hikubox dot com.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
And people can also find out other things on your site.
What are some of the things they can also learn
on your site.
Speaker 6 (21:29):
So we have sort of two websites. We have the
the hikerbox dot com website is you know, where you
can buy the hikubox and you can learn about you know,
what other people's experiences with it have been. There's a
whole bunch of resources. We have a weekly newsletter that
you can subscribe to you don't have to own a
hikubox that kind of looks at history of studying birds
(21:51):
and cool interesting facts about different species that comes out
every week. So yeah, there's a lot of great resources
there too, Okay, And your other website is so the
other website is if you have a haiku box, it'll
show you a map of all the hiku boxes in
the world. So if you want to go, like, you know,
look at one in a different part of the country
(22:12):
or I just noticed we had one in no Malaska
and you can go click on it and see what
birds are detecting there and what they sound like. And
you can also obviously look at the birds that you're
haiku box is detecting as well. I should say, you
actually don't need to buy a hiku box to use
that website as well. You can just play around with
it and see what's.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Going on, okay and learn about birds. Yeah, okay, Well, David,
I want to thank you so much for coming on
Best Beds for Pets and teaching us more about birds
and as well as.
Speaker 6 (22:42):
The hikup box awesome. Thanks so much, Michelle.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
I hope you all enjoyed the show. If you like
birds or sounds technology, check out haiku box. It is
amazing on the birds that you hear and it's hikubox
dot com, so be sure to check it out. Be
sure to check out haiku Box. I want to thank
my guest David Mann for coming on Best Bets for
Pets thanks to my career which okay ironically they're cat slash, Dennis,
(23:08):
Charlotte and Mollie. They're my inspiration while I listen to
the birds. They like to watch the birds. They don't
top them. They're in their cadgo. And of course thanks
to everybody listening to Best Bets for Pets. I appreciate
your listenership so much, and of course the show would
not be the same without the magic of my producer,
Mark winter Mark, thank you so much for all you do,
and remember you never know what you're going to have next.
(23:31):
On Best Bets for Patsy
Speaker 5 (23:33):
Let's talk bets every week on demand only on petlife
Radio dot com.
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