Bird watching just got a whole lot more high tech. Birdsy, a wildlife-spotting camera, has developed a unique artificial intelligence (AI) that records and identifies birds and other animals all by itself, meaning you never have to miss out on priceless nature moments again. The Wi-Fi-connected camera can monitor your bird feeders and yard 24/7, identify each species it spots, record and log each animal visitor, and send the data directly to a smartphone app for you to enjoy. The app even makes it easy to share your favorite bird spots on social media. Since Birdsy was launched on Kickstarter, it has raced past its original goal of $60,000, with 506 backers pledging a total of $114,790 to help bring the project to life.

New research demonstrates for the first time that artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to train computers to recognize individual birds, a task humans are unable to do. The research is published in the British Ecological Society journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution. "We show that computers can consistently recognize dozens of individual birds, even though we cannot ourselves tell these individuals apart. In doing so, our study provides the means of overcoming one of the greatest limitations in the study of wild birds--reliably recognizing individuals." Said Dr. André Ferreira at the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE), France, and lead author of the study.

Trying to identify a wild bird while frantically leafing through a bird-spotters' guide is no easy task. But modern technology has come to the rescue, with artificial intelligence trained to help out amateur twitchers. Where people may be confused by two similar looking birds, or a juvenile which does not yet have its adult plumage, AI has been found to identify birds with up to around 90 per cent accuracy. The technology was trained using pictures of wild great tits and sociable weavers, as well as captive zebra finches. It works in a similar way to the face-recognition programmes used to identify people in crowds.