28-year-old from Vitoria-Gasteiz winner of BEING BIRD competition

Mr. Iker Fernández de Antona, a 28-year-old from Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital of the Basque Country, has been chosen winner of the BEING BIRD competition for developing an application for locating wildfowl, an app which is downloadable and manageable from any electronic device. Besides receiving a monetary award, Mr. Fernández de Antona, recently graduated in Technical Engineering in Computer Science from Mondragon Unibertsitatea and in Computing Engineering from the University of Deusto, will be able to develop the application with MONNA project partners and in close collaboration with the Urdaibai Bird Center in the Basque province of Bizkaia.

The BEING BIRD competition, aimed at university students, was opened last June by the Basque Country Electronics, Computers and Telecommunications Cluster (GAIA-Cluster TEIC), in collaboration with the University of Deusto and the Urdaibai Bird Center, within the remit of the MONNA R+D Project, in which satellite techniques for monitoring birds are investigated, the aim being that Europe be a world technological leader in matters concerning the monitoring of nature.

According to its creator, the winning application is aimed at companies, bird organisations, ornithologists and individual users, “who, either as a hobby, or in order to study the behaviour of birds and the different routes they take, wish to manage information about bird species”. Moreover, all this can be undertaken from a mobile phone.

The app has a number of different functions, which are intuitive and user friendly. Amongst other content, there is a wildfowl guide, ornithological and migration routes, as well as an advanced search tool where birds can be consulted by their scientific and/or common name.

It can also narrow the search by habitat, region, colour, size, shape, wing shape, type of call and even where the bird may be found depending on the season of the year. Once the search is effected, the user can access the bird file, enabling the visualisation of a gallery with various images of the species, its name, the breed, its characteristics and the habitat in which its diet may be found. Moreover, the file enables hearing the characteristic song of the breed.

It is anticipated that this application will be of great use for users who have responsibility for breeding birds, because the option has been incorporated from the application itself to read QR codes which can replace the typical metal rings that wildfowl usually have. Thus, the user simply capturing the code with their camera, can visualise the file and incorporate new data therein such as the location where the bird was found, observations, etc.