Category Archives: History

From forum sites to Merlin Bird ID app

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I’ll like to take a different approach to this story and meander a bit first. When my daughter was born, I developed a keen interest in photographing her, eager to document her growth over the weeks, months, and years. Back in the early 2000s, capturing every moment of life with a mobile phone was not the norm. At that time, compact digital cameras were the primary means of photography. My first digital camera was a Fujifilm MX-500, which I purchased in 1998. By the time my daughter arrived, this was the camera I used to take her first few photos. However, it was outdated by then, so I quickly upgraded to a Canon Digital IXUS 400. This was a significant improvement, but as my daughter became more active, I realised I needed a better camera to capture her in action.

That’s when I upgraded to a Canon EOS 300D. A more sophisticated camera like that required actual skill, so I turned to a local forum called ClubSNAP to learn more about the technology and techniques for taking better photos. Through browsing this forum, I was introduced to the world of nature photography, particularly the stunning bird photography that was displayed in one of the subforum. I thought to myself then that one day, I would explore that genre.

Fast forward to 2010. With more time on my hands, I decided to buy a Canon EOS 7D and an EF 300mm f/4 L IS lens to start photographing butterflies and birds around my neighbourhood in Punggol. I took numerous photos of birds, but I had no idea which species they were! When starting a hobby like bird photography, one doesn’t begin with all the necessary resources in hand. Just as I had done when I bought the Canon EOS 300D for my daughter’s photos, I returned to ClubSNAP. I soon discovered that, over the intervening years, the go-to place for bird photography discussion had shifted to another forum, NaturePixels (now defunct).

Amidst all the beautiful photos and photography topics posted, there was a Bird Identification subforum where one could ask for bird identification help, and more experienced birders would respond. I made it my mission to identify all the birds I had photographed, and over the next 2-3 years, I asked numerous ID questions. One person stood out in answering them: his forum nickname was jiaolong, and he was exceptionally patient and knowledgeable. I must have asked more than 100 separate bird identification questions in total.

By November 2010, based on some forum posts about interesting rarities spotted there, I made my way up to Bukit Timah summit. I met a few fellow photographers, took more bird photos, and struck up conversations. One of them clued me in on two things. Firstly, I should explore Bidadari, which had already become a popular topic at the NaturePixels forum. Secondly, I should join a Facebook group called Birders Group. This was a revelation. I started actively participating in that group and got to know more bird photographers in real life. As I became more acquainted with people, I was invited to join my first birding-related WhatsApp chat groups.

Around the same time, I also stumbled upon another site: a Yahoo Group called wildbirdSingapore (now defunct). Yahoo Groups was an old-fashioned online discussion board/mailing list hybrid, and wildbirdSingapore was one of the boards where local birdwatchers and birders from NSS had been active since around 1999. Clunky and outdated as it was, joining and participating in this group helped me connect with birdwatchers rather than bird photographers. Interacting with this community quickly made me realise their expertise in all things related to local birds. To keep up, I began buying bird field guides and doing the hard work of learning not just how to photograph birds, but also about their identification details, their habitat, behaviour, and more.

At the end of 2011, the birdwatchers at NSS were interested in holding an official Big Year for 2012. I think they were quite surprised when a photographer joined, especially one with barely a year and a half of experience. I decided that part of my education would be to challenge and benchmark myself against these birders, so there was no shame if I performed poorly. My birding buddy See Toh joined as well. Part of the Big Year involved updating our periodic scores in a Facebook group called SG Big Year Birders. I decided to ask everyone participating in the Big Year to join a WhatsApp chat group too. Inadvertently, this catalysed a significant change in Singapore’s birding culture. While the birders were more experienced and could find and identify birds on their own, I was already deeply embedded in other WhatsApp chat groups and Facebook groups. I even created and managed a Facebook group for bird photographers called SG Birders. These groups and their participants were my eyes and ears on the ground, so I had far more information about rarities than anyone else. By sharing this information quickly in the Big Year WhatsApp chat group, common etiquette dictated that some of these initially hesitant birders began to reciprocate by sharing their own rarity sightings.

I performed very well in the Big Year 2012. In many ways, I demonstrated that a sufficiently motivated new bird photographer could excel in this endeavour, provided one is willing to think outside the box, know how to crowdsource important information, and persuade others that it’s in their best interest to share. But the first Big Year also revealed something else to me: the gap in bird-related knowledge between the average bird photographer and birdwatcher needed to narrow for the community to move forward together. I knew many bird photographers wanted to know where to find and photograph rarer birds. If only there were a place where one could discuss where the rare birds were, as well as a place where discussions about bird identification were not only welcomed but encouraged. On the birdwatcher side, they also realised their own dwindling numbers contrasted with the ever-increasing number of bird photographers, and these bird photographers served as valuable eyes and ears on the ground. In 2013, I started Bird Sightings Facebook group to bring these two groups together for what I considered a win-win situation. I thought it would be a small group, but an effective one. In retrospect, the smaller group size allowed for better communication than a larger one that now exists.

In 2016, I started the Singapore Birds Project, with one of the aims being to complement the Bird Sightings group in helping to raise the standard of knowledge about local birds. I believe both the Facebook group and the project achieved their aims. There are now many talented birders and bird photographers who are knowledgeable about birds and helpful to each other, especially to those just starting out, thanks in part to the resources provided in the past. Many are also now hybrid birdwatchers/bird photographers, so the old classifications and divisions based on the equipment used are no longer as relevant.

However, let’s take a closer look at the situation now in 2024. A new birder might still join Bird Sightings or use the Birds of Singapore website. Or they might not. Their first experience in identifying a bird might be through the Merlin Bird ID app, or by joining large Telegram groups dedicated to instant bird sightings. They may check eBird for the latest rarities and as a way to find out more information about the birds they’ve seen. Or they may still use larger WhatsApp chat groups or join Instagram to communicate and share with their community there. These newer tools, and others that will inevitably emerge, together with the affordability and improvement in cameras technology have lowered the barriers to entry into our hobby even more and that’s a good thing. The lowered barrier of entry has resulted in Singapore’s birding community becoming much more diverse. This diversity in the community is a strength. A broader range of people with different skillsets, abilities, and experience will result in a community being more adaptable to new challenges. A diverse community often comes up with better, more creative, and innovative solutions to problems, as well as to opportunities, leading to better outcomes for everyone within it. The challenge from the perspective of the community as a whole, as always, lies in organising itself to work towards common goals rather than splintering off when things don’t align perfectly.

Looking back at the changes over the past 14 years or so, it’s clear that it wasn’t just technology being replaced. The ways in which birding groups organised themselves and their members in the past no longer seem relevant, and the value proposition for joining them has diminished. If incumbent community groups become complacent or fail to adapt to evolving birding norms, it could lead to newcomers or segments of the community bypassing them and organise themselves differently. Nature abhors a vacuum, and eventually most of the community will inevitably move to those with fresh approaches and leadership.

P.S. I realise that blogs like this have seen their heyday, and most birders I know now favor Facebook posts. But I prefer this medium, where I can write without worrying about reach or likability. Peace!

Bidadari Park Revisited

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When I first took up birding in 2010, Bidadari, once a cemetery, had become a hotspot for birds and birdwatchers. It was a migrant trap that attracted a lot of migratory species of birds that stayed for a day or two, much to the delight of birdwatchers and bird photographers then. You can read more about the historical place and the birds here.

We always knew the place was slated for development even when it was at its prime.  There were proposals to save the area and even a Facebook Group that I co-moderated trying to advocate for its conservation. Though the group eventually fell into inactivity, it was once a vibrant online community with many fascinating posts about the site and its birdlife.

Returning to Bidadari, ultimately the development got the green light to proceed, but with some concession to preserve a small part that was referred to as the hillock.  Bulldozers soon arrived, and today, a new HDB estate stands where Bidadari once flourished.

On 3 September 2024, Bidadari Park which was the redevelopment of a park within the new Bidadari HDB estate was officially open to public. The hillock, likely the last remnant of Bidadari’s original vegetation, still stands. This area, affectionately dubbed “Bida Studio” by birders, was once a prime spot, with small bushes and fallen branches attracting flycatchers, cuckoos, kingfishers, and shrikes. The birds emerging from the foliage often offered great views.

I haven’t visited the new park yet, but I’ve heard that migrant birds have started to appear, and I’m eager to explore it once the crowds thin out.

New birders might wonder how the new park compares to the old Bidadari. While the green space may still serve as a migrant trap, the old and new locations share little physical overlap. Below are Google Earth images from 2014 and the latest from 2024, with a thin yellow line roughly outlining the border of the old Bidadari.

Starting the Singapore Birds Project

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Let’s begin with a little side-story from a decade ago. In 2014, on top of getting involved in another birding Big Year, I slowly got closer to the birders from the NSS Bird Group. Eventually, I helped them set up their WordPress blog, Facebook Page and a separate Facebook Group as well. It was an active period, both in birding and in things concerning birding. On the latter case, I started strategizing for NSS on how to build an online presence that served the birding community better. Engaging the community’s interest included a lot of writing birding articles on our blog, drumming up interest in and moderating the newly formed Facebook Group and Page and explaining birding best practices in person. I was everywhere and involved in many things. It was a good year and I became an improved birder and a better communicator in the end. Winning the Big Year against experienced competitors then was just the cherry on top.

By 2015, I was also invited to join the NSS Bird Group’s Records Committee and was considered part of the inner group of leaders involved in the Bird Group. But unfortunately all was not well, for reasons I’ll explain in more details one day. In the end, we parted company amicably and I gave control back to NSS members most of the assets I’ve spent my effort building. Pity that in removing my role from the WordPress site, articles I authored were no longer reflected as mine.

The entire thing was not as bad as it may sound here, as I was actually on friendly or at least polite terms with most of the NSS birders, even today. We just have different ideas on what’s the best way forward, and I did offer my suggestions on how they should proceed in finding new talents to groom for bigger roles in the future.

By the end of the year in December 2015, having some time to reflect, I felt re-energized and motivated to move forward with my own plans instead. I came out with a few ideas on how to contribute back to the birding community and one of them was to create a bird app, with an emphasis on nice bird photos provided by the local birding community itself. So I posted my thoughts in the independent Facebook Group I set up earlier called Bird Sightings.

The idea of the bird app was well received but there were more pressing matters at hand. Part of it was that we still needed to compile all the information needed for the bird app, like photos, description of the birds, habitat of the birds, it’s breeding range and all the other things that at that time were not as readily available. I thought we’ll fill in those parts first and then perhaps move into app building. So first thing first, we needed to build a website to facilitate in the writing, and in asking for contributors to actually write, and/or provide photos. I’ve actually outlined some of the process in building the site in a blog post at here.

For the content site, I persuaded my birding buddy See Toh to be the main editor and writer, and I helped contribute some write-ups as well, but my work was mainly at the back-end. I have also persuaded members of the birding community over at Bird Sightings FB group to provide great photos of some of the birds. Within days, we got something out as a start.

For reasons that I have now forgotten, my first write-up was actually posted as a page here in this blog first rather than at the new Singapore Birds Project site, so you can actually see what I wrote here unchanged from the day it was posted:

So on 4 January 2016, the project’s website was launched. It was a modest and pretty bare site, but we intended to move quickly to fill the gaps.

See Toh was great at writing the species accounts, and we very quickly filled out the outline for many of the uncommon and rare species. We cannot help but be birders looking out for rarities and hoping that our write-ups will facilitate future sightings of some of these species. Knowing that the species write-up was going well, I self-relegated my efforts to the back end of things and to figure out what information was important to fellow birders, and what was possible to do with my limited scripting knowledge and resources. In 2016, what we felt important was to provide birders that came to our pages with information about the bird species with regards to their description, how they differ or look the same as other species, where they can be found and where they came from if they are migrants, what’s their behaviour, and very importantly, clear photos of said birds to aid in visual identification.

I wanted both the Malay and Chinese name for birds included in the website, because I thought we needed to cater for some of the Chinese speaking birders among us, and I always felt an affinity to the Malay bird names being that many of the resident and common birds in South-east Asia would have been named first by the native inhabitants, and the English names were somehow less interesting. The first problem was I am Chinese illiterate! Secondly there were quite a few different Malay names of the same birds created by different field guide authors. For the former problem, thankfully there were multilingual birding list provided by IOU that was just a matter of extracting them throughs some scripting. For the Malay name, I had a friend Tou Jing Yi, who was actively compiling them and updating them to the current taxonomic treatment. His website is here.

For those thing we cannot fully provide, we provided links to other sites that could. In 2016, Oriental Bird Images (OBI) was a useful resource for bird photos, xeno-canto was important for bird calls and song, Wikipedia was important for general information about the species. In 2024, the order of importance have changed, with eBird taking over many of these needs. The challenge for the website (which is now called Birds of Singapore), is to continue to stay relevant and helpful to birders new and old. For that, a new generation of birders are charting the way forward. Oh yeah, the bird app thing? It never happened during my watch. We just took a different journey!

P.S. In writing this entry, I relied heavily on Facebook to confirm details of events. I am still a bit wary of the longevity of Facebook in terms of preserving some of these older postings. There is no guarantee that in the future things will remain as is, so I’ll try my best to write them down here in this blog.