Birdsong Bliss: Spring and Summer Fun with Haikubox! #Springintosummerfun

Birdsong bliss can be achieved with the award-winning Haikubox, your ultimate AI-powered birdsong identifier designed for home use! Once installed in your yard and connected to the app, you’ll receive instant notifications about all the beautiful birds that call your yard home or stop by during their travels. I love that I can embrace the joy of nature and connect with the vibrant life around me with Haikubox!

Haikubox utilizes a neural network, which is a specific kind of machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) that involves training a computer to recognize specific patterns or features in data. In the case of bird identification, a neural network is trained using a vast dataset comprising thousands of accurately labeled bird sounds. This dataset is a teaching tool, enabling the computer to learn and distinguish individual bird calls and songs. With Haikubox, this neural network is in the palm of my hand ready to help me achieve birdsong bliss!

Haikubox Notifications

As soon as I connected the Haikubox to my phone, I began receiving alerts about all the birds in or traveling through my yard. Above, you can see a screenshot of a Cooper’s Hawk that visited my yard. This is such a cool bird to have in the yard!

When you receive the notification, you get a stock image of the bird and a recording of the actual sound of the bird in your yard. You can also play an enhanced version of the sound that removes some background noise, making the sound clearer.

Whenever a new bird comes into my yard, I receive a “new bird alert” on my phone. It is so fun to see how many different types of bird life make my yard their home!

The screenshot above shows a summary of the birdlife in my yard. The Haikubox has been installed in my yard for a little over a month, and we have had 1273 different bird songs and 22 different species visit us. The most frequent visitor is a House Finch.

The American Goldfinch is another frequent visitor.

The Red Crossbill has only been heard in my yard once, so it is one of our most elusive visitors!

Haikubox

The Haikubox comes preloaded with a one-year subscription for $249 or a five-year subscription for $399. You can also purchase a Haikubox with a three-week free trial for $199 and then pay $59 a year to maintain the subscription.

Having the Haikubox preloaded with a subscription and being Wi-Fi-enabled makes setup a breeze. All you have to do is mount it according to the instructions, connect to your Wi-Fi, download the app, and you are ready to start getting bird alerts!

The Haikubox comes with the box (which measures 2.5 x 6. 1.5 inches) and an 11-foot power cord that plugs into a standard 110-volt outdoor (GFCI) outlet.

For this review, I received the Haikubox with the one-year annual subscription so I could experience all of the enhanced Haikubox features, like notifications about new and favorite birds, a shareable weblink for friends and family, and viewable bird identifications beyond the last two hours. To access all features, I can maintain the subscription at $59/year or downgrade to the free subscription with limited features.

As you can see in the image above from last spring, my backyard is full of huge trees. My Haikubox came during winter, so the trees are bare. I cannot wait for spring because if Haikubox could identify more than 22 different bird species in the winter, I can only imagine how many bird visitors we will have when the trees are full of leaves! Birdsong bliss is only a few weeks away!

Community Science

The fun and excitement of receiving new bird alerts and listening to the unique bird songs make Haikubox unforgettable, but contributing to community science is an added benefit. Every Haikubox owner becomes a community scientist within the Haikubox network, contributing invaluable data to global bird behavior mapping and climate change studies through a collaboration with the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

My Thoughts

The Haikubox has made my backyard a place to explore nature like I never have before. It is no wonder why it was one of Time Magazine’s best inventions of 2024. I had no idea that we have so many types of bird species in our area, and being able to differentiate their songs is fun. This year, my dad moved into a small house in our backyard, and he was so happy to learn that he could also have access to the Haikubox with the shareable link. He now can have his own birdsong bliss! He always texts me when we get a new bird alert to discuss it! Just this week, we had our first barn owl visit the yard…. very exciting!

The community science aspect also makes the Haikubox unique. My data will automatically be added to Cornell University’s database. They collect and interpret bird song sounds to inform and advance the conservation of wildlife and habitats. It feels good to contribute to something that will help bird conservation.

Spring Update!

As I mentioned above, I received the Haikubox in the winter, and now that spring has sprung, the birds have been busy in the backyard. I get new bird alerts almost every day! While finches still seem to be our most frequent visitors, we have recently had hawks, sparrows, and our first great-horned owl! We are now up to 5969 calls and songs recorded! I love my Haikubox, and I will definitely renew my subscription for another year!