FOLC Now Monitoring Birds w/ Haikubox at the Lost Coast Nature Center
Thanks to a couple of local birding enthusiasts, the Lost Coast Nature Center in Whitethorn has been blessed with the donation of a Haikubox!
An automatic birdsong identification tool, the mission of Haikubox is to improve environmental literacy and promote conservation and stewardship by helping people learn and care about the natural world – much the same as Friends of the Lost Coast! Haikubox is fast becoming the world’s largest nature monitoring network – and the data collected at the Lost Coast Nature Center is shared with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, developers of the popular Merlin app (a great companion tool to Haikubox).
Haikubox works 24/7 to provide bird recordings, species alerts and data summaries using a proprietary machine learning algorithm trained on visual spectrograms of 3-second sound clips; updated with input from Haikubox owners. The free Haikubox mobile app and website share real-time bird identifications and recordings and maintain historical records for each data collecting location.
FOLC went live with our Haikubox at the Lost Coast Nature Center on June 3, 2026 – and it has been fascinating to see the birds and bats frequenting our site, making for an exciting new education tool and an easy plug & play citizen-science program! In just the first few days, we’ve tracked scores of diverse bird and bat species – all of which can be viewed, in real time, by finding Lost Coast Nature Center on the map of the Haikubox app. Download the app for free on your phone’s App Store – and be sure to set our Lost Coast Nature Center site as one of your Favorites!
You can also view and listen to the real-time action on our Lost Coast Nature Center listening page at https://birds.haikubox.com/listen/E4B063BBB044. Check it out – and visit regularly – it’s literally changing by the moment!
Happy birding – and keep an eye out for future education activities, data interpretation, and other announcements highlighting our adventures with Haikubox…