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"I used to carry all these big, thick books. Now I use mostly the apps," says Helen Emwood, who trekked from Maryland to get her fill of the Ohio warblers. Electronic apps take a toll on your phone's storage space, but they can show more of the real-world variation in a single species of bird. "With a flick of the finger you can see the immature, the female," Emwood says. iBird remains a fixture, but there's more competition now. The Audubon Society made its app free in 2015, and the top dog of the paper bird guide world, the influential Sibley Guide to Birds, is now available for $20.

"The day we invent a pair of elegant flight iphone case binoculars that just automatically identifies a bird for you -- that's going to be the end of birding as we know it," Strycker says, with a chuckle, "If you already know everything in advance, then it wouldn't be fun anymore."Maybe, Maybe not, After all, people still ride horses and bake their own bread even though cars go faster and the supermarket offers plenty of baked goods, Experts who've paid their dues might be peeved newcomers don't face the same challenges they did, but nobody's suggesting we roll back the calendar, After all, James Audubon had to kill the 435 species of birds he drew in his his book of paintings, Birds of America, first published in 1827, Thankfully, we don't have to do that anymore..

And the power of the internet is making it easier to find those recordings. Professional libraries of recordings are helpful but relatively limited. Now Xeno-Canto, an immense collection of bird recordings contributed by birders around the world, gives you more to compare. That's helpful given that birds have regional dialects not necessarily obvious in an app. If you have a smart speaker, you can even listen to birds while you're fixing dinner. Try saying, "OK Google, ask Bird Song Skill for a great horned owl," or "Alexa, ask Bird Song for a northern cardinal."Bird recordings also have a controversial use: They can prompt birds to come out and defend their territory when they hear the call of a rival.

"It works amazingly well," Strycker says, "It's almost the only way to see birds in some places, like in the Amazon where the jungle is so thick."A Forster's tern looks for fish to snatch from the San Francisco Bay in Palo elegant flight iphone case Alto, California, He and the Audubon Society recommend using that method in moderation, "We advise against it during breeding season when the birds are the most territorial," Saha says, And don't play calls repeatedly or play calls of endangered species, "By riling them up like that, you make them exert all this extra energy they could be using toward survival," Saha says..

It can rile up other birders, too. As I walk the Magee Marsh path, one woman plays the call of a prothonotary warbler. Another birder gets excited and calls out the ID, thinking he's found the genuine article. But his enthusiasm quickly turns to an irritated glare when he finds he'd been hoodwinked by an app. Another new audio option is arriving now: Using your phone's microphone so an app can identify for you the bird that's singing. "When it works, it's this miracle," says Sherwood Snyder, director of product management at Wildlife Acoustics, maker of the Song Sleuth app for iPhones. Indeed, the first time I tried it, the app correctly pegged a brown-headed cowbird's liquid burble, helping me ID a bird I'd never seen before.