Record your five-minute bird counts

5 minute bird counts are a popular way of monitoring forest birds. One of the problems with these is that they are sensitive to the hearing abilities and recognition skills of the observer. One way to mitigate this is to record your 5 minute bird count, so you can listen to the recording later and have others listen and help you identify any birds you struggled to recongnise.

The free Cacophony Bird Monitor Android app now has a 5 minute bird count mode.This lets you record for 5, 10 or 15 minutes and add notes. The recording is uploaded to the Cacophony Portal, where it is stored at no cost, with the location and time noted. You can even use the recently released audio tagging interface to note which birds you have heard. You can also easily share this information with others and pull it into a spreadsheet using the new data export functionality.

There are people working on automatically identifying birds from the recordings made. Once these algorithms are available we will run them over old recordings and automatically tag any birds that are found.

If you have a Bird Monitor then you can just use that. If not then you can use an Android phone, although we do recommend buying an external microphone, rather than relying on your phone's microphone.

More information: DOC's guide to five-minute bird counts