The coolest thing I’ve heard all day

So I was researching iPhone apps for the crafting world and came across this news item for a future iPhone app that will let you take a picture of a tree and then will identify it for you. How rad is that? When that happens it will be great, but until then I would like some other nature / gardening related iPhone apps.

I would like East Bay Regional Parks District to have an iPhone app with maps of all their parks.

I want to see tree, bug, flower, weed, bird identifying apps.

Having an app that lets you identify a bird by whatever characteristics would be great. Let’s take bird calls for instance, what if you could hold up your phone, maybe record something or just hold it up, and it would go hunt around in its database to try to match a bird song. I would be able to figure out right away, sitting here at my kitchen table for sure that that bird I hear is a robin.

For sight identifying it would work like 20 questions.
What area of the world are you? With a world map you touched in the right place.
What season is it?
What size is the bird? Bigger than a breadbox?
what is the over all main color of the bird?
Beak shape?

etc. until it whittles it down and gives you a few to choose from. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology (BTW, I LOVE their new logo, it’s all charley harper-esque, very styley!) has The Birds of North America online, the info is already in a database of sorts, is it freely accessible? I would then like the to be able to flag it as a bird I have seen, where and what time and who with and then I want to be able to plus my phone into my computer, hook up to a web site and coordinate it with other peoples sitings. The listing should have all possible info about the bird plus web sites to go to for more info plus links to flickr groups and tags for that sort of bird.

This would work for plants and insects as well.I searched for similar apps but haven’t seen anything yet. Have you?

UPDATED: L. mentioned iBird (why didn’t I find this while searching?! my searching skills suck, also, i was NOT searching in iTunes like I guess I should have been… This is what I get for LOATHING the iTunes store.) in comments and WOW!

It has like all of the things I wanted! The pro version is 30$. Pricey! But think back on the days of lugging like 5 bird identifying books out with you on a walk. Those days are GONE. Now, do I need the Pro version? Could I get by with a regional version? No, I need pro, it has links to wikipedia and flickr!!!! Plus, I’ll need birds of hawaii when we go in October..

I’ve actually gotten shaky with anticipation of downloading this.

In iTunes for 4.99 you can get North Woods Field Guides which includes trees, tracks, wildflower, fish, flyfishing (I could do without the fish ones…) animal poop, and garden insect. OMG! iSurvive Wilderness. All about how to survive… main point being: do not let your phone batteries run out. Okay, there are TONS of apps for the nature nerds. I’m going ot have to read some reviews before downloading any others.

Thank you L! for noticing those!

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