Want to spot a 'nerd birder'? There's an app for that

When you are trekking through the snowy forest preserve counting species with a group of Audubon bird watchers, you can spot the rare "nerd birder" by its most distinctive feature: The iBird app on the iPhone.

"I love the new technology. I'm the nerd birder," gushes Louis Vassmer, 55, a Palatine birder and president of the suburban Prairie Woods Audubon Society. "It makes me feel like a smart birder; not an expert, but competent."

In the early days of the 21st Century, Vassmer and his wife, Sylvia, expected a productive day as they went birding among the 60 species of birds at the Crabtree Nature Center in Barrington.

"We were like, 'OK, that's a cardinal. OK, those small birds are -sparrows?'" Vassmer remembers. "I'm not that good. The frustration of not being able to identify birds was very difficult."

His phone's new three bird-identifying applications (iBird Explorer, Birdseye and the Peterson Field Guide to Birds) each costs less than $20 and are the reason Vassmer confidently pointed out species such as a Red-headed Woodpecker, chickadee or White-breasted Nuthatch to his 11-year-old niece Hannah on Sunday during their hike in the Deer Grove Forest Preserve of Palatine.

Doesn't the iPhone shatter the image of a bird watcher taking notes with a pencil, and then sketching an image to compare later in a big book at home?

Vassmer smiles.

"There are a couple of people who want to rip this out of my hand," he says, holding his iPhone close to his chest. "They'll say, 'Why can't you use your wits?' and 'What's wrong with reading a map?' But wits only take you so far. If I could have this thing implanted in my body, I would."

When Vassmer spots a woodpecker-looking bird, he whips out his phone and quickly scrolls through the photographs of woodpeckers until he finds the match, a Downy Woodpecker. He pulls up descriptions, statistics, the bird's range, several photographs and fun facts, such as a flock of woodpeckers can be called a drumming.

"You sound so intelligent in the field," Vassmer says, his voice suddenly taking on an air of authority. "'Look, a drumming of woodpeckers.' I like stuff like that."

While there are a few of what Vassmer calls Luddites, birding community leaders are embracing the brave new world.

"There's all kind of great stuff," says Judy Pollock, the bird conservation projects manager for the Audubon-Chicago Region office in Skokie, where the annual Christmas Bird Count is underway. A gadget that can keep track of birds you've seen, what birds might be near you and where and when a species was last seen "is so tailored to the ways birders think," she says.

"Instead of a series of notebooks on shelves accessible only to you, now we have an online database of bird records where you store your information and, most importantly, make it available to the broader birding community," says Brian Sullivan, project leader for the eBird database at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "It doesn't supplant careful field observation. You still have to go out and collect the data."

But collecting data is so much easier with one of the high-tech features Vassmer loves _ the ability to click on a link that lets you hear the call of a bird.

"It's a lot easier than going home, turning on the phonograph and trying to find the spot on the record where the bird call actually is," says veteran Audubon member Nancy Lloyd of Fox River Grove.

On a recent hike, when Vassmer's fellow birders thought they heard a nuthatch, he electronically summoned its call for comparison.

"I hear it now," an excited companion said.

"Um, that's the phone," Vassmer had to tell them. "They got a little aggravated."

With such great power comes great temptations.

When sparrows started eating everything from his bird feeders, Vassmer played the shriek of a Red-Tailed Hawk, "and they just instantly dispersed," he admits sheepishly.

On a recent field trip with children, Vassmer used his iBird call to keep a real Rose-breasted Grosbeak interested enough to stay around. That might have bent the rules of nature, but it did get the kids interested in birding and the environment.

"Sometimes," Vassmer says, cradling his phone in both hands, "you have to do those little transgressions for the greater good."