IDTIPTHAT - Tipping Culture and Birding

Tipping has long been an accepted culture in the service industry and was certainly well entrenched in serious birding circles when a guide was acquired for specific efforts. In many cases volunteer efforts by summer graduate students would result in free guided programs where they’d have a chance to earn tips for meals and minor expenses. Going even deeper though I suppose I was well aware of niche subcultures within regional birding populations where a six-pack or other minor reward would be offered to another birder when something was found of great interest to the other birder in a given geographic region. A token of appreciation for when a long sought species was finally found and promptly shared to the community. Perhaps acting as a vaccine against withholding or even not bothering to share rare finds in a timely manor. 

I will admit though it surprised me to see these tipping culture concepts make a real jump into the mainstream of birding. For all but the very elite, birding was just a hobby and certainly never treated as an income source. Within my own circle it came so subtly and quietly that I was scarcely aware it was happening at any scale. I noticed one day on a social media post that a Magnificent Frigatebird had been sighted on a northern lake actually perched on a break wall extending out from a viewing platform. The post was as you’d expect for a rarity of such epic proportions for a species a thousand miles from home. What we’d often called a hurricane bird had ended up inland and was now perhaps gathering itself for a return to home. The post ended though with a link that clearly read IDTIPTHAT.COM and a bunch of other letters and numbers after the main URL. 

I read it softly aloud, I D (I’d) TIP THAT. I looked up the address on a web search and found it to be a tipping platform designed specifically for micro-transactions in a peer to peer setup. So it was effectively Venmo or TipJar, but tilted specifically to bird watching? Given that the platform was peer to peer and had an open transaction log I opened the link and found that the finder of the bird had set up tipping for this bird find event specifically. A small story was attached of how they found the bird along with some automated details below of the fact that it was one of only a handful of historic records for an inland lake in the state with no other bird ever being refound by other birders. The statements wrapped up with a request to tip the birder for sharing details so quickly and especially if the bird was refound and significant for you personally. 

I myself didn’t chase, but I was fascinated by what was happening. I soon found an article for a local birding group in New York City that indicated the app's origins were just a year prior and that the top tip earner was already at $7500 and counting from finding two reasonably rare species in Central Park along with a few other mid level rarities along the waterfront. Standards seemed to exist in the app so that setting up single bird finds for tipping was limited based on regional rarity and survey interest from other birders signing onto the platform. 

In the case of the Frigatebird no survey responses were necessary for interest as it was a red alert rarity for the region based on exposed historic records from eBird and the state records committee itself. It appeared features were built in for tip event birds to alert app users based on the distance the find was from your phone's position. It was now possible to monetize your rarities and I realized that the social media post was the users way of getting the word out more broadly since application adoption in the area was likely nearly zero. I asked in the comments of the post about the tipping app and link, acting as if I was clueless for the purpose of generating some discussion. I didn’t really know the other birder, but was genuinely curious how others would respond as well. 

The conversation thread was wild and showed a massive delta between the most in favor and those so vehemently opposed they needed to be muted and removed from the thread completely. It was as you’d expect anytime something new arrives. The most deeply entrenched and traditional people would line up to “protect” tradition and the past ways while others saw it as a great way to even gamify the hobby and provide a great incentive for others to share their finds. Maybe even encourage concerted efforts by birders to turn up more rarities to share in the hopes of hitting it big. It appeared to me the hobby was ready for something to shake things up and the concept really did take root shortly thereafter. I checked up on the landing page for the rarity and it had actually generated $275 for the birder after dozens were able to see the bird prior to it taking off and presumably exiting the area permanently just two days later. Perhaps voting on the technology myself I chipped in $5 despite skipping the chase and congratulated them on a wonderful birding find of a lifetime. Just like similar platforms you could attach messages and emotes to the payment and a sort of digital ledger and greeting card resulted with comments spanning the gamut of potential statements. 

$10 “Thank you for sharing this special bird. You made this long time state birder a happy man.” 

$.50 “I appreciate the bird, but man I hope this doesn’t take off.”

$2 “I can’t believe I’ve sunk so low as to pay for birds now.”

$6 “Have a Starbucks on me friend. Keep it up.”

Reluctant tipping all the way up to deep felt appreciation. This all just felt to me like an evolution in tipping culture for a space that had historically few reasons for it to exist. As I typically do though I started to wonder where this went next and how it would progress. The answer was a bit of a surprise as I saw rapid adoption of the platform within just weeks. Every year hundreds of birders found rare and semi rare birds in the state and they’d just fling them out on eBird or other platforms to share with other birders. Something though really caught me off guard and that was that a very large contingent of the community almost immediately changed how they report birds they found.

The app offered a mode of payment with bonus dollars for birds held exclusively by the app for notifying other app users. Nothing was required for getting alerts and you weren’t required to tip for finding the bird also, but the app was the sole initial distributor of the reported find and location details. Downstream the app even integrated with eBird and other reporting structures, but those details would be held until at least a day later to give app users a leg up and incentive to use the app. It barely mattered that an app user could get the report and then subsequently tell others of the bird's availability to bypass the app use for everyone else because they themselves wanted to also have the opportunity to earn tips on future birds. Even in the case that a bird was very rapidly reported on other platforms, it became common practice to share a finders name and tip details at the same time. Champions of the service would soon comment on social media posts that generically posted rare birds by campaigning for the finders tip page to be used. Groups on places like Facebook started to protect original finders by dropping posts that did not conform to standards of attribution and linking to tip pages. 

I would say that within one additional year it was now universally standard for rare birds to be tip linked in some way shape or form. We even started to see less involved bird contributors have a sort of tip funding page setup for them as a way to say thank you for reporting. The platform had an option to send a check to original finders that did not engage in the technology at all with just a few setup details needed. My favorite of them was the first state record Broad-billed Hummingbird that was posted by a kind older woman wondering what on earth was visiting her sugar water feeder in the spring. Once identified the tip spreaders as they became called got her a page and set it up to automatically pay out once the bird left the area and was no longer being reported. The indication was that some 600+ people visited the tip page with a large bump coming in after the details were shared on a local news station. She received in total just under $4000 for the rare bird after kindly letting just over 200 visitors to her back yard for over two weeks. 

When reached in a follow-up interview the woman was flabbergasted that anyone would ever give money to see a bird showing up in someone’s yard, but that she was eternally grateful for the kindness and would never forget the time she and her yard were the center of the bird watching community. 

Things continued to shift each year further and further from the traditional model of giving out your rare birds without a tip link. It eventually found its way directly into eBird itself and you could actively answer in app whether you wanted to monetize your rare bird find by ensuring sound or photo evidence was uploaded during the submission process. Everything else was handled for you and your account would be cleared by direct deposit every quarter of the year. New contests started to crop up and we collectively found ourselves in the monetized and gamified world of “casual” birding for dollars. Top 100 lists started to show up for each region with number of monetized birds found and top earners for the year and lifetime. All time lists for the most profitable single bird found were coveted not just for the money they earned you but for the clout of being a high value rarity earner. 

All of this was a sight to behold and witness in real time. Decades of birding community engagement changed so rapidly that a person would scarcely recognize the hobby just ten years later. Birding clubs would still run guided outings, but they now came with tip guidance and sign off from attendees. Rarities found by the group were the money earning right of the club/organization itself and could only be monetized by the trip leader on behalf of the organization. In this way subsequent chasers were really donating to the organization itself with tax implications being favorable for large donations. 

I certainly won’t claim that everything was cut and dried happiness, but it was really impressive to see some organizations deeply embrace the culture to the point that they went from a handful of guided excursions a year to featuring them every single week rain or shine. I had heard from one chapter’s treasurer that in a single year their guided “free” programs earned them $14,000 in tips alone. Certainly some of that was likely wealthy benefactors choosing to give via bird tips rather than just writing a check as an annual donation, but it was amazing to watch the shift and what money directed in this way could achieve. 

My natural assumption was that some critical aspect of giving away rare bird finds to others changing over to tip culture would fundamentally break the hobby in some way, but it really didn’t. In many ways for the vast majority of birders the scales were pretty balanced or perhaps titled only slightly out of their favor since most people had a standard budget for birding in general so they weren’t likely to send out so much money that they’d be uncomfortable with the outflow. Those that found the occasional rare bird often were more likely to allow their tip account to roll over so they could use that money to tip others, creating a sort of zero sum game of birding payments. We all just got on board with sending small sums of money around to each other as acknowledgement and a sort of dollar based voting on the best rarity found each year. 

All of this was of course true for the majority, but where most saw a normal minor exchange and opportunity to say thank you with small token rewards, others saw a chance for true profit. It didn’t take long for a couple factions of birders to try to leverage rare hunting for profit. The first I was made aware of was a proactive and athletic grad student that decided to skip summer work in favor of rarity hunting for tips. It became obvious just weeks before finals as spring really got going as rarity after rarity got posted to the platform by the same user. The rivers, lakes, and marshes close to the dense metro became dragnet operations looking for something postable to the platform with some garnering just $20 or so, while a few peaked into the $200 range. All total the leaderboard for the state showed some $4700 in earnings on the year. I had to imagine the gas and related costs probably didn’t really amount to a true profit, but the model was being set in these early days. 

I mentioned multiple factions and it wasn’t much later I found out that a few retirees had begun to apply strategy and experience to their efforts. With snow bird homes in warm climates these birders began to focus all birding efforts on rarity finds wherever they called home at the time. No longer were bird watching outings a focus on personal life lists and county lists, they were a concerted effort to make as much money as possible throughout the year while engaging in the hobby. Results varied, but the best of the lot indicated in an interview that they had put up 23 rare tip worthy birds across three states and made a grand total of $25,000 in a single year. It wasn’t money that was going to change your life, but it was a crazy amount of money for doing something you were already going to do anyway. I found myself wondering if the rarest bird I had ever found would have made me significant money or not if it had happened during this golden age of paid birding. I suspected it would have been at least a few thousand for that Ross’s Gull, but who’s to say. Maybe it just wouldn’t resonate because it was a Gull species. You could definitely see the pretty factor starting to play a roll for a chase bird where something outlandishly rare, but drab would generate only a few hundred dollars while a Painted Bunting might generated six or seven thousand from the same community of people. This all appeared to be because the hard core contingent was nowhere near as legion as the more casual set that existed at the fringes of the hobby. 

So that is what happened. Tipping came and stayed in the birding community. It became deeply entrenched in a very short period of time, but many iterations of improvement and variation spun off from that initial tipping link that I saw for a Frigatebird. Like many others I kept a pretty even balance for years, looking to reward others while occasionally gaining some coin for my own efforts. Not really needing the money helped I suppose and it was more fun for me to drop $10 to $20 dollars on someone for a meal as a reward for finding something truly outstanding for my home county. I even tipped a friend a promised $100 for finally finding me a lowly Harlequin Duck in the county, the first record in some 35 years and one I missed by a year before moving to the area. Looking back now I’m not sure I would have ever predicted tipping for birds, but I’m actually glad it happened. I, like many others, still hope for that lottery ticket bird to show up that sets the birding world on fire. The eBird and IDTIPTHAT world record sits at $135,000 tipped for a single Eastern Towhee that showed up in England. Silly that a bird so common in it’s range would generate such buzz. A large chunk of that was tipped by a single long time birder of the country that had longed to see one since childhood, but it also holds the individual tippers record at 1,235 tippers.

All of these top level numbers though are tenuous at best as the concept continues to advance and take root in more places. As media outlets pick up on these events it’s become common for broader tipping to happen when a media darling shines in front the of the camera. A 12 year old avid birder on the east coast reported a Greenshank that was picked up by the local news and went viral on social media. He topped out at roughly $42,000 in earnings for that bird alone with the vast majority coming from non-birding community tippers looking to send some love in the form of dollars.

For my own part I’ve kept birding like I always do looking for my own birds to monetize, while keeping my eye on volunteer dollars. I’d long since shifted all my rare finds from my local nature center property to tipping platform to funnel a few extra thousand dollars to them in the process. A win win in my book.  

Borbaton

It was a kickstarter post on my Facebook feed where I first saw the clownish product name of Borbaton. So many random products had hit our feeds over the years that I scarcely even noticed it amongst the 80% ads that now propagated my daily view on the platform.

 

It looked like a floating droid ball from a science-fiction movie that might move about and shoot lasers at enemies. AI driven content though had long since made it nearly impossible to tell reality from fantasy. I lingered on the post though curious at the least what the name even meant. 

Bird + Orb + Automaton = Borbaton

The drone-like device promised an impressive array of sensors and capabilities that were meant to aid the owner in finding and identifying more species of birds while in the field. The ad even claimed the product was live and their project only needed start-up capital to produce the first lot of them for field testing by backers. Typical language of, “spots limited”, “the future is now”, and “birding will never be the same again” were plastered across the video sequence showing a user controlling the Borbaton setup via smartphone and voice command.

It was mesmerizing as one user drove up to a wetland and simply held the device out the window and commanded it to scan the entire wetland area for uncommon to rare species. It lifted off from their palm in silence and jetted up to about 100’ feet in the air. Overlaid text and audio indicated the device would create a map of the space to cover and then begin using visual, audio, and thermal scanning to map prospective species. Tools were noted to include extensive machine learning models for visual and audio based identification, which would be reported back to the users phone app. Device based advances were indicated to be nearly silent propulsion and hovering modes allowing near zero disturbance to birds. 

The video shifted to the still seated driver reviewing a phone app that was beginning to show muted listings of common birds in the marsh. The Borbaton hadn’t yet dropped altitude to start scouring the area when a yellow flagged species popped up on the screen indicating a 75% confidence rating in the presence of a Common Gallinule with audio being the initial source for identification. The camera shifted view to the device now descending and silently moving towards the back corner of the marsh space. A few seconds later it sat frozen in air as a chime could be heard from the phone. Panning back to the phone screen showed a video icon next to the flagged record now showing 100% certainty with audio and video proof being noted. 

The user tapped the screen and up popped a live video feed showing a once hidden Common Gallinule slowly paddling along a line of cat tails. The audio feed filled the vehicle cabin with calling Red-winged Blackbirds and the soft grunts of the Gallinule that was much to far away to be heard by ear or without the aid of this particular device. 

The driver spoke again asking the device to continue scanning the area. The advertisement wrapped up with a splash screen indicating 500 spots available for the pilot program and a hefty $8,000 price tag. It would be a $4,000,000 dollar startup with promises of advanced software updates for early adopters to bring on further capabilities in the future. A short list included full autonomous mode, deep scanning, nocturnal analysis, and something referred to as hive mind. 

I pressed the replay option and watched it all again, fascinated by what might be if this were not just a cash grab scam targeted to the birding community. A day later I still hadn’t made up my mind, but returned to the bookmarked web link for the starter that now indicated less than 50 spots remaining with an estimate of only a few hours before it would likely close. I had done some research and found that the project team comprised a couple former Cornell alums and an MIT friend that developed the engineering around the drive mechanism and silent operation features. Beyond the fact it was almost to good to be true, it really did appear to be an honest attempt at bringing autonomous drone technology to bird watching. It would be the next step beyond having listening devices that pull in lists of birds all day and night from a stationary position. 

Little did I realize that upon taking this 8K leap of faith I would enter a world of bird watching I never could have imagined. My own field mobility had waned several years whence, though I still greatly enjoyed getting to the more remote locations. Immersing myself in the sounds of the wild was a joy that helped reduce the isolation and loneliness that permeated most of my days now. My hearing had dulled on one side considerably and back issues finally found me after decades of long hikes. I figured I was in better shape than many my age, but each year a little bit more was being taken away. I longed to somehow stave off time itself for even just a few more years before I might be rendered mostly sedentary. I knew the bell would toll for me one day and all I sought was to continue my long friendship with the birds in any way that I could. In that light the money would either buy some small measure of what I sought or be a lottery ticket dream that simply didn’t win the day. I was fine with either outcome honestly, but I wasn’t prepared for what came next. 

- - -

Weeks stretched into months and despite consistent social media posts I began to lose faith a product would arrive. My assumption was that I had in fact purchased vapor ware and nothing more. In the meantime I had begun reviewing the source code that had been posted to a repo online for the project. It appeared that the developers for some reason decided to open source their project code, perhaps with the intent that it would be improved by the user community during testing. That seemed a stretch though considering how few birders were actually programming experts. The documentation page gave even fewer clues as it could scarcely even be understood that the code was intended to run on the borbaton platform at all. I had found the repository only after a cryptic social media message led me to an unrelated users profile with a truncated URL link. I cloned the code and moved a copy to my cold storage drive assuming it would be a way to recover any future device should the local storage fail. Though I never really thought a device would materialize in all honesty.    

Sometime in the deep of winter word went out that devices would ship in the coming weeks once they cleared approval from the government. During production new regulations went into effect that instituted required testing and licensing protocols for any type of autonomous drone technology that would be fitted with AI pilot routines. Though it was boring reading, the regulations implied that drone technology would not be allowed to run on a software platform fully controlled by artificial intelligence. Everything made me wonder if the end result would be a hamstrung device capable of much, but not all that was promised. I would of course take what I could get if it meant a flight capable device with near silent operation that was still capable of finding birds and identifying them using existing machine learning models for audio, video, and images. 

As the wait continued to stretch into additional months I recognized in the codebase I cloned from the now defunct repository that the pilot core actually appeared to be based upon a modified autonomous vehicle. I quickly concluded that the codebase that had been shared was in fact the original intended code for the platform and that I likely had pulled one of a very limited number of copies. When I performed my pull the website had noted just 6 users total. What all of this meant wasn’t clear beyond the reality that it was seemingly gone along with the user account that had posted the original link to the code repository itself. The developers social media account had been scrubbed of the reference to the now missing user account and in place was now a post indicating a direct link to the open source code was available. 

The two code bases were light years apart from one another and presented what I originally thought we’d see. A hamstrung device platform with limited AI and simple search mechanisms that would likely go off in scripted methods and routes over a defined space. From what I could tell it was still pretty impressive, but nothing compared to the advertisement seen on Facebook. Oddly even that video and ad was now missing from every location I searched. It was as if the origins of the project had been scrubbed completely from the web during the production approval cycle.  

Just like that though a large box arrived via signature delivery in the early spring. It seemed comically large for a device that would fit into the palm of my hand. I had to open it on the front walkway, remove the contents, and break down the box to get it in the door. There it sat though on my coffee table in a black three-point stand held like a crystal ball covered in a fine coated mesh. When I placed it down the weight of it felt substantial for something that was to hover and fly as if defying gravity itself. For the first time in ages I felt those prickles of anticipation and excitement of a new toy a child might feel on the morning of a birthday. The one sheet color guide was really just a QR code to open the real instruction manual on their website that I had already covered a few times over so I ignored it outright. 

I had already installed the core interfacing application on my phone several weeks prior and at this point was ready to go after device pairing was completed. Proximity alone was enough for that and lights began to flicker along with a quick hover check as it gently and nearly silently rose off the stand. After a few rotations the borb settled back to the base, ran another series of checks and popped validation content streams up on my phone for audio, video, and thermal imaging. Device audio asked me to stand up and move about for follow mode. I stood up slowly, feeling my age in the process, and shuffled slowly across the room. As I grasped for a handhold a few times, the Borb moved towards the ceiling and slowly trailed my position while streaming video of the entire sequence of my movement around the open living space of my home.

I wrapped up in home testing with my mind spinning from what I was experiencing even without birds being included. I realized that upon finding a rare bird that a Borb could be sent out to monitor its location as long as it had charge. The ramifications for chase birding were pretty wild with the potential for real time updates to be streamed to other reporting platforms while the finder was comfortable in the car or out bird watching in other spaces beyond the target bird.  I imagined even protected species could literally have a Borb keeping an eye on them and holding aggressive birders or photographers at bay when necessary. I needed to begin field work immediately.

 

- - -

Just a few feet from the parking lot was the first wetland and scrubby wooded space I wanted to try out the Borb. I’d known this space and the park itself for some 35 years now. It typically had nothing of great interest, but as a control I felt like I knew the space pretty well. Trails ringed the edge of the woodland buffer with a few incursion points allowing viewing of the few acres of water, last year's cat tails, and several downed trees along the edges. 

My plan was simple with this test. Send the device out while keeping my own list from my stationary position with binoculars and ear birding only. Let the Borb stream a species list back to my cell phone and compare the two to see how well it does against my own efforts. 

I held the Borb out with my right hand and it lightly lifted off holding position in front me waiting for commands. 

Me: “Scan the wetland in this area stopping at the wooded ring, parking lot, and campsites along the far shore for all bird species possible.” 

Borb: “Command understood, beginning scan mapping.”

The Borb shot up to the expected 100 feet of elevation or so and hovered for about a minute as it presumably scanned the area and generated a map of the territory to be covered. The AI routines I had read were capable of parsing language pretty well and using machine learning models could photograph the area and figure out what I meant by wooded ring, parking lot, and campsites as constraining parameters. 

A chime hit my cell phone and I was shown a map with live images that had been stitched together of the area from the Borb. The map was overlaid with a grid indicating what it had interpreted as the borders of the zone to be scanned along with an additional grid of what it would fly as it transited the area listening and looking for species to identify. I was able to push an agreement icon for the search plan and things began in earnest. 

I then put my phone away and began birding as I normally would, easily ignoring the Borb at this point as I was locked in on my own identification tasks and honestly the device was so quiet and low flying that I couldn’t even see or hear it at that point. It was what I most expected from this location for the time of year. The ice had cleared just a week or two prior and a handful of ducks could be heard, though from my position I couldn’t see most of them, I still knew them to be Mallards. An Eastern Phoebe could be heard calling, and was a early arrival and my first of year for the species. A single Red-winged Blackbird was calling to setup territory as well on the near shore. Soon I heard a Song Sparrow belt out full song as well followed shortly after by a handful of American Crows flying over the pond causing a racket. 

I kept listening and looking for birds and eventually ticket 14 species until the chime came from my phone at the Borb had completed the effort and was returning to base. Seconds later it zoomed up over the dead cat tails and froze in front of me at arms length. I held out my right hand and the Borb settled quickly and shut down leaving all it’s weight in my hand. My phone chimed a second time indicating the command sequence and effort was fully complete. I set the Borb down in the car's front seat after shuffling back to the parking lot and subsequently found a bench to sit on while reviewing the results. I took a deep breath and opened the app for the Borb and selected the most recent engagement and then the option for review complete checklist of species and counts identified during the scanning operation. 

I stared at the list for several moments, stunned at what I was seeing. The list indicated the device as identified 27 bird species and a total of 54 total individuals during the effort. The device had nearly doubled my own efforts and though I expected more I just didn’t think it was really possible from just a single location at this time of year. I was at 14 species and 22 total individuals so I was keen on figuring out where all of the added species were in such a small space.  The list was a expandable for each species fortunately and when I opened Red-winged Blackbird it showed GPS coordinates for 3 total individuals despite my hearing and seeing just one during my own efforts. 

I further clicked on display map for the species and their GPS locations were placed on the original grid map it had generated for the effort. The one bird I had seen was clearly marked in the exact location I had first seen it minutes ago. The other two though were shown off map a few hundred feet away at another pond to the north. Though the Borb had never left the target area, it was still able to map out birds it was able to hear with incredible accuracy using audio triangulation features built into the audio array of the device. I then examined the 13 other species I hadn’t even identified on my listing effort and was surprised to find Tufted Titmouse on the list. I had spent so many years in the park (almost 20) before finding even one short term visitor that I was certain this was a device error. In fact I recalled the problems of the early versions of the Merlin app from years prior where small segments of other species calls would regularly be identified as Tufted Titmouse. As I clicked into the GPS coordinates and mapping they resolved to an even further away woodlot to the north and west. I knew it well also and it was reachable by trail at just about ½ mile.

I girded myself and grabbed a walking stick to help steady my efforts. I was resolved to make the walk even if it took me half the day. I had to see this bird to verify what was happening and what I was being shown. I had an idea though and grabbed the Borb from the front seat of the car first. After holding it out in front of me I asked it to track down the most recent Tufted Titmouse identification and keep an eye on it for me while I walked out the location. The Borb acknowledged and shot up into the sky out of sight. Roughly twenty seconds later my phone pinged with a message that the bird had been found and was being monitored. 

I shook my head, at a loss for what was happening. It was so surreal that I was now following the bird GPS pins of a non-human device. I set out at my own glacial pace that was the standard for me these days. Breathing deep I finally noticed the crisp cool air of a spring morning and savored the exhale. I didn’t know how long I’d be able to get out into these conditions, but they filled me with such joy and appreciation for nature that I hoped it would be several more years at least. Progressing slowly I turned a corn at the end of the wetland and wooded ring of the pond and saw the ¼ mile distant woodlot that promised to hold a Tufted Titmouse. It wasn’t a rare bird for the area, but again it was one that just didn’t spend much time in this particular park and was more likely to hold fast to the river valley several miles east. I checked the Borb app a few times and saw that the tracked bird had moved several hundred feet, but was still within the same wooded space and not far off the natural trail that bisected the space. The Borb app in the meantime had begun a more detailed list of the space it was now monitoring and had jumped up the bird list to now 30 species since it began with the most notable species being a Northern Flicker in the same area as the Tufted Titmouse. I estimated this to be an overwintered bird that was finally free to move about the area since the bulk majority of them had not made it back to the area yet.

I finally entered the woodlot twenty odd minutes later and nearly immediately hear the Tufted Titmouse calling it’s Peter, Peter, Peter call. I half expected a Blue Jay for the number of times I’d been trolled in the past by them masquerading as another species. Not today though as I finally laid eyes on the Titmouse after a few more minutes' walk. Even that was not a normal event though as I neared the prospective location I spoke into the app to have the Borb give me a visual indicator of the bird's location. The Borb moved positions and projected a foot shape on the ground in front of me that glowed and pulsed in a greenish light. Then one after the other like it was walking me to a viewing position. After a few dozen of these, new projections began in red up the side of a tree like an ant march of dotted lines with an arrow in the lead. Eventually the arrow froze and just pulsed and my phone issued the audio note.

Phone: “The Tufted Titmouse is about six feet beyond the final pulsing arrow.”

I picked it up quickly as the bird seemed to peck at a seed or nut it had found while foraging. I was dumbfounded how developers had created such a robust device and how it put me on a bird with such ease nearly a ½ mile away from where it all began. It was in this moment that I realized everything was now different. Birding for the remainder of my days would now be something else that I’d never experienced. I didn’t know if it would all be positive and well changes, but the implications were amazing for what could be accomplished. I had used just two features of the Borb at this point and was beyond impressed with what it could do in those use cases. Just then the app pinged and asked me a question.  

Phone: “Would you like Borb to take a photograph for documentation of the bird?

Me: “Yes, please do.”

Phone: “You can also configure Borb to take photos of all species categorized as uncommon and beyond if you like.”

Me: “Yes that’ll be fine.”

Phone: “Borb configured for automatic photos of all uncommon to rare bird species.”

Just then a photo icon showed on the display next to the entry for the Tufted Titmouse. A high resolution photo of the Titmouse was on screen once I tapped the icon showing better image quality than anything I’d taken in my long history as a bird watcher. I asked the Borb to follow me back to the car and continue scanning for new species on the way. I put in that it should hold position for any rare species, but the return trip was relatively uneventful as we walked and floated together along the trails. The only thing that peaked my curiosity was a ping about half-way back to the car when Borb noted.

Borb: “My sensors have detected a Purple Martin flying at higher altitude above our current position, but you won’t be able to see or hear the bird and it will be out of my own range in roughly. 12 seconds.”

The bird had been noted because it was perhaps a week or two early for arrival. 

Me: “Would you be able to get a photograph if you pursued the bird?”

Borb: “Yes”

Me: “Please do so as quickly as possible.”

The Borb silently jetted off and was out of sight within seconds. I looked at the phone and tapped the video icon in the upper right to show a live video feed. At first I just saw blue, but soon a black dot grew larger until I could see wings and even a light purple hue and a slightly forked tail. The Borb locked in on the bird, adjusted focus and zoom a bit and the image froze showing the photographic evidence of the bird I would never see personally. It would turn out the sighting was in the top five earliest for the area for Purple Martin. I wondered how reporting would be handled considering this was a real record, but not one a human would be capable of producing. I realized though that stationary listening stations had been listing for years so this was scarcely much different. My only moral quandary was whether I should be claiming the sighting as well or not. After all, the device was now an extension of myself and only took the actions it did based on my instructions. Wasn’t it just a new pair of binoculars or a camera with more functionality and I’m the one behind the device?

The day was just the start of the rabbit hole we all went down when the Borb entered the birding community as the first partially autonomous birding companion. When I arrived back at my vehicle I thought of the cold storage code I had cloned from the repo and the fact that it looked an awful lot like it was meant for a fully autonomous device. What if the government had made them remove that code from the devices? Did a version of reality exist where Borb would just be on it’s own and could go bird watching alone, stopping only to recharge? Would I be bird watching with a device that would act more like another person than something I owned? Would I have to ask the Borb to come birding with me?

I would get answers to these questions and more eventually. I hadn’t even scratched the surface yet.