Lindsay McNamara is an avid birder. Her weekends are typically packed with birding trips to state parks and recreational areas across New Jersey, where she identifies birds primarily based on their looks and habitat. But starting in March, as the pandemic advanced into the United States and shelter-in-place became the new normal, McNamara, who is the Great Egret Society Manager for 蜜柚APP, started birding from her apartment window. That meant increasingly relying on bird song to identify species. “It’s really hard to bird by ear,” she says. “I don’t read music. I don’t play an instrument. And without having that kind of lexicon, it’s difficult.” But confined birding meant that she was seeing and hearing the same birds over and over again, helping her develop a vocabulary of local bird sounds. McNamara drew from tips and tricks she had learned from Cornell’s introductory “Be a Better Birder” online course (more on that below). But that isn't the only resource...