Welcome to the home of the Tangled^™ field guide.

Tangled is a smartphone field guide application that integrates

• multiple field guide topics,
• multimedia directories (e.g., photographs and recordings of species),
• phenotypic directories (i.e., documentation of observed features and behaviors of species), and
• local species sighting logs.

The audacious goal is for Tangled to be an inexpensive field guide that describes the field as a whole.  Presently, the birds of North America topic is the only field guide topic fully implemented in Tangled.  Other field guide topics are partially implemented ... and evolving.

Five years in the making, Tangled is now one of the most extensive smartphone applications documenting the birds of North America.  Because the structures and processes are the same for all field guide topics (e.g., birds of North America and flowers of North America), the implementations of other field guide topics are expected to take much less time.  By design, those structures and processes are flexible in order to follow the moving target of field guide documentation.  For example, the birds of North America topic is changing every year due to the annual updates to the AOU (American Ornithologists' Union) checklist.

The Tangled components (i.e., the multimedia directory, the phenotypic directory, the sighting logs, the local maps, and the executable code) are individually updated, as needed.  And, the larger components (i.e., the multimedia directory and the phenotypic directory) can be differentially updated (e.g., only the new photographs get downloaded).  The process of porting the Tangled components to different platforms is ongoing.  If you would like to receive an email notice when a port is available for your device, register here.

The next Tangled field guide topic to be fully implemented will be flowers of North America, which is a large superset of the wildflowers of North America.  For example, it includes all the flowering trees.

The name Tangled is a reference to a sentence in Charles Darwin's conclusion in The Origin of Species.

"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."

Tangled encourages the exploration of those interesting relationships among species.

The Tangled application is a collection of interconnected, or tangled, check lists.  For example, if you highlight the Red-winged Blackbird in the classification list of the birds of North America topic and switch to the audio list, the Tangled application automatically scrolls to and highlights the Red-winged Blackbird recording in the audio list.

Another type of list interconnection is the check projection logic which is the Tangled application's alternative to the single-access identification keys often found in paperback field guides.  For example, in the Tangled birds of North America guide topic, checks of plumage colors (e.g., red, black, white) in the photograph attribute list can be projected to the photograph list to see which photographs show specimens with those colors.  Then, those checked photographs AND the checks in the geography list defining your location (e.g., BCR 29 for the Piedmont) can be projected to the classification list to check the species that have the colors of interest AND are currently in your location.

Perhaps the most important type of Tangled interconnection is the linking process (e.g., the classification list's 'select/link' menu item) which integrates whatever field guide information, from whatever source, the user has copied to the device's SD card.  Although Tangled is authoritative in the sense that it includes the latest field guide information from leaders in each field guide topic, the problem of documenting local fields is too vast for any authority.  The Tangled linking process encourages the inclusion of the national/authoritative field guide topic information as well as the local/collaborative field information.  For example, species sightings are stored by the Tangled sighting application (TS) in spreadsheet files in the /tangled/sighting directory on the SD card.  Although a separate spreadsheet file is created for each site/observer, these spreadsheet files can be exchanged among local friends and local groups to help each other learn about the local species at a particular local site.  The Tangled sighting application can quickly compile the sightings from a variety of site/observer spreadsheet files into a single sighting list documenting the species at the site.

The Tangled application's geographical coverage is currently limited to North America because Eduneer LLC is located there.  However, if you want to compile a multimedia directory and a phenotypic directory for species on other continents, you will get the support of Eduneer LLC.

More precisely, Eduneer LLC is in Lynchburg VA, advantageously located within the southern range of many northern species and within the northern range of many southern species.

Field guide organization is a dilemma for authors of paperback field guides because no single organization can satisfy all their field guide users all the time.  For example, from Alderfer and Dunn (page 97 in National Geographic Birding Essentials, ISBN: 9781426201356),

Many beginners ask, "Why don't they arrange field guides by color?  That's what I see first and what's most important to me."  In chapter 2 we touched on why all the best field guides are arranged taxonomically with related species shown together.  Briefly, there are so many variations within each species and among closely related species - between males and females, between different ages, between different times of the year - that arranging them by color would result in chaos.  Not only would closely related species often be found sections apart, but birds with equal amounts of different colors would also get arbitrarily assigned to one or another group, and males and females would often get separated.

Field guide organization is not a dilemma for smartphone field guide application developers because smartphones can reorganize the field guide information at the whim of the user.  The default order of the species listed in Tangled is the taxonomic order, described by Alderfer and Dunn as the order of all the best field guides.  However, Tangled users can easily rearrange the order of species according to plumage color or some other characteristic.

For example a friend of mine, who is very familiar with geology and is just starting to learn about birds, asked me in November, "What are those Robin-like birds in my yard that are red and black with white trimming?" That apparently simple question actually isn't that simple.  It involves a question about plumage color (i.e., red, black, and white), a question about about size and shape (i.e., Robin-like), a question about location (i.e., my yard), and a question about seasonal distribution (i.e., November).  Here's one way to answer those questions using Tangled.

• Switch to the photo list.  The plan is to have Tangled check the photos of specimens that are candidates of being the Robin-like birds my friend saw in his yard.  When the list of candidates (i.e., the number of checked photos) is reduced to a manageable number, their photos will be viewed.
• Switch to the photo attribute list (accessible from only the photo list) and check the plumage colors of interest: black, red, and white.
• Tap the '>' icon to project those checks to the photo list.  Note that an easy way to remember the difference between the two projection icons is that the '>' check projection icon is pointing away from the list name and therefore is an outgoing projection of checks to other lists.  The '<' check projection icon is pointing to the list name and therefore is an incoming projection of checks to the currently displayed list.
• In the automatically displayed projection options dialog, check 'and' for source, because we want to check the photos that show black, red, and (rather than or) white plumage.  Check 'reset' to initially clear any checks currently in the photo list.  Check 'or' as the destination check combination logic.  (Note that the Tangled check projection logic is always implemented in two stages: combining the checks from source lists, and combining that result with the checks in the destination lists.)  Finally, in the projection options dialog, tap the 'OK' button.  The three checks in the photo attribute list are projected onto the photo list as 66 checks.
• Switch back to the photo list.  You can verify that there are 66 checks in the list by seeing the [66] in the photo list's title bar.  All of the Tangled lists display, in brackets in the title bar, the number of checked items in the list.
• To reduce that list of 66 candidates to only those that have a Robin-like size and shape, switch to the attribute list, clear any existing checks with the 'check/clear all' menu item, check the passerine shape, check the Robin size, and tap the '>' check projection icon.
• In the automatically displayed projection options dialog, check 'and' for source, because we want to check the photos that show species that are Robin-like in size and (rather than or) shape.  Check 'photo list' because that is the destination list for the outgoing check projection.  Uncheck 'reset' because we don't want to clear the previous results in the photo list about the color of the specimens.  Check 'and' as the destination check combination logic because we want to display the photos that have previously been checked as showing the colors of interest and that show species that are Robin-like in their size and shape.  Finally, tap the 'OK'.  The two checks in the attribute list are projected to and ANDed with the photo list to reduce the number of checks to 22 (from 66).
• 22 photos is a reasonable number to view, but it is possible to reduce that number more with check projections concerning location and season.  Switch to the geography list, select the 'check/clear all' menu item, check BCR 29 (i.e., Piedmont), and tap the '>' check projection icon.
• In the automatically displayed projection options dialog, check 'and' or 'or' for source (it doesn't matter because we've checked only one BCR),  Check 'photo list' because that is the destination list for the outgoing check projection.  Uncheck 'reset' because we don't want to clear the previous results in the photo list.  Check 'now' because we want the list of species associated with the checked BCR (i.e., 29. Piedmont) to be limited to only those species that have been sighted there in the current week of the year according to eBird sighting statistics.  Check 'and' for the destination check combination logic because we want to display the photos that have previously been checked as showing the specimens with the colors, size, and shape of interest ANDed with those that are currently in the Piedmont BCR.  Finally, tap the 'OK'.  Now the number of checked photos in the photo list is just four.
• Switch to the photo list to see that the candidates (i.e., checked photos) are the Ruby-crowned Kinglet (one photo), the Eastern Towhee (one photo), and the Red-winged Blackbird (two photos).

When I showed my friend the photos and he saw the Eastern Towhee, he widely opened his eyes and smiled as if I had predicted and then had correctly drawn a nine of diamonds out of a freshly shuffled deck of cards.  However, rather than being a trick, it is just a simple demonstration of the value of integrated information.

The list of 10 steps may seem rather lengthy to answer the question "What are those Robin-like birds in my yard that are red and black with white trimming?"  However, each step takes only a few seconds, and that list of 10 steps is intentionally long in order to show the intermediate results of the check projections.  Often, it is possible to check items in the source lists and then switch to the destination list and perform a single incoming check projection operation (i.e., '<').

Songs and calls are frequently helpful when identifying birds.  For example when the tree canopy is full, birds are often heard but not seen.  So you might think that, given the number of impressive references for identifying birds by sight, there should also be lots of impressive references for identifying birds by their songs and calls.  However, that's not the case.

Typically, bird song references are a compilation of recordings (and perhaps narrations) that take a lot of time to use.  For example, I used bird song CDs to try to identify the unknown (and unseen) birds I had heard during trail running.  Although, I would try to remember song details, when I got back to the bird song CDs those details would fade more with each recording I played until I soon had almost no recollection of what I had heard on the trail.  Carrying a recorder would have helped (my recall, not my trail running), but a recorder would not help with the considerable problem of matching an unidentified specimen's vocalizations with the correct recording in the CD's several hours of recordings.

This time consuming bird song matching problem was the motivation behind the development of the Peck bird information manager.  In fact the namesake feature of the Peck bird information manager is the pecking form, in which users peck (i.e., draw) their rendition of a bird song on the touchscreen and the application sorts the available recordings according to how well they match the drawing.  Although the task of manually drawing a bird song on a touchscreen may seem unnecessary when the device has recording capabilities (as smartphones typically do), ears and brains have a big advantage over electronics in that they are able to focus on an individual bird song coming from a group of birds singing at the same time (as birds typically do).  The problem of focusing on one sound source out of many is commonly called the 'cocktail party problem.'  As described by Wikipedia, the cocktail party problem is

“where a number of people are talking simultaneously in a room (like at a cocktail party), and one is trying to follow one of the discussions.  The human brain can handle this sort of auditory source separation problem, but it is a very tricky problem in digital signal processing.  Several approaches have been proposed for the solution of this problem but development is currently still very much in progress.”

To use the pecking form in Tangled,

• switch to the audio list,
• tap the 'O' (for order) in the title bar,
• check 'dec' (for decreasing) in the lower right corner (so the best matches get displayed at the top of the audio list),
• select 'pecking order (audio search)' from the list of available sort orders,
• tap the 'OK' button,
• on the displayed pecking form, peck (i.e., draw) your rendition of the unidentified bird's vocalization, and
• tap the 'OK' button.  After about five or ten seconds, the entire list of recordings appear sorted according to how well they match what you've pecked.

The pecking form looks something like a tic-tac-toe board, but performs like a timer: the duration of the screen touches are interpreted as the duration of the vocalizations.  For example, if a note in a bird song lasts for 1.5 seconds, your screen touch representing that note should also last for 1.5 seconds.  The bottom, middle, and top rows of the pecking form's first two columns are the places to peck low notes, mid-range notes, and high notes, respectively.  For example, the vocalization of warblers should be pecked in the top row (because they are high pitched), and the vocalization of herons should be pecked in the bottom row (because they are low pitched).

Concerning the columns, the left column is for clear vocalizations (such as the clear whistle of the Northern Cardinal), the center column is for noisy or coarse vocalizations (such as the nasal 'caw' of the American Crow), and the right column is for vocalizations that are too fast or too variable to peck.  For example, the harsh machine gun-like vocalization of the Belted Kingfisher is too fast to peck.  Therefore the pecking should be done within the 'U' (for undulation) in the right column and, because the rattle basically stays at the same pitch, the undulation selector in the lower right corner should be set to '1' (for 1 pitch).  Another example of pecking within the 'U' would be the pecking of the fast 'tea-kettle, tea-kettle' song of the Carolina Wren.  That song undulates between three pitches and therefore the undulation selector in the lower right corner should be set to '3' (for 3 pitches).

It is worth noting that your pecking doesn't have to be perfect: the matching algorithm (commonly used to match DNA sequences) allows for inexact matching.  Practice will give you a feel for the tolerance of the matching algorithm.  Try practicing by pecking the songs of some birds you know, or by pecking the some of the included recordings.  If you want more detailed information about the pecking form, there is a tutorial available.  With practice, the recording matching the pecked rendition often appears in the first 20 recordings listed.  If you peck a masterpiece, it might even appear as the first recording listed!

As with the 'Identify species by sight' scenario, you can narrow your search by projecting checks from other lists onto the audio list.  For example, after you sort the audio list according to how well the recordings match your pecked rendition of a vocalization, you can check the first 30 recordings and then project the seasonal geography list onto the audio list to check only the recordings of species that are currently in your area AND that have a vocalization that match your rendition.

Birding experts are very good at knowing what birds to expect in a particular location during a particular season.  Tangled raises the expertise of the rest of us with quick access to eBird sighting statistics.

To sort the Tangled class, photo, audio, or video lists according to the frequency of sightings of species that have occurred in the checked BCRs (i.e., the checked Bird Conservation Regions in the geography list) during the current week of the year

• tap the 'O' (for order) in the title bar,
• check 'dec' (for decreasing) in the lower right corner (so the most frequently sighted species get displayed at the top of the list),
• select 'seasonal sighting statistics' from the list of available sort orders,
• tap the 'OK' button,

The eBird sighting statistics are very helpful when identifying birds by season.  Another helpful perspective on species sightings comes from bird record committees.  The checklists maintained by bird record committees are authoritative documentation of each state's bird sightings, including rare bird sightings.

The checklists of many of the state record committees are included in the Tangled application's custom list.  Checks can be projected to/from the custom list in the same manner as checks are projected to/from other Tangled lists.  For example, to check the class list with the 364 species in the Virginia checklist category 1 (species with over five sighting records) maintained by the Virginia Society of Ornithology,

• switch to the custom list,
• scroll down to and check VA1 (you can read the description of VA1 by double tapping it),
• tap '>' (i.e., the outgoing check projection icon),
• in the automatically displayed check projection options dialog, check 'class list', check source 'or' (or 'and' since they both do the same thing when there is only one check in the custom list), check dest 'or', check 'reset' (to initially clear any checks in the class list), tap the 'OK' button, and
• switch to the class list to view the 364 species listed in the VA checklist category 1.

Paperback field guides are rather constrained in the information they can include.  In National Geographic Birding Essentials - All tools, techniques, and tips you need to begin and become a better birder (ISBN: 9781426201356, p.29), Alderfer and Dunn describe the constraint.

"Most modern field guides present text, range maps, and illustrations together on the same page or two-page spread.  This is the most convenient arrangement for quick reference, but the downside is that there is very limited space for text.  As a consequence, most species accounts are terse presentations of the most important field marks, including voice, with short descriptions of status and distributions.  There is not room for much, if any, information on behavior, habitat, nesting, migration, or other life history details, although you will find that there are innumerable good references on such subjects."

Given that a 32 GByte SD card is about the size of a little finger's nail, Tangled is not constrained by room.  More information (on behavior, habitat, nesting, migration, or other life history details) is welcome and easily added.  For example, suppose you are interested in knowing which bird species have females larger than the males.  To add that attribute to Tangled,

• review some good references for such a subject (e.g., the Birds of North America accounts),
• in the class list, check the species with larger females,
• select the class list's 'select/create list report' menu item,
• in the automatically displayed report options dialog, enter a title that suitably describes the attribute (e.g., "larger female"), enter the source of the information, and check 'attribute',
• review and edit (if needed) the created report text file,
• move the created, reviewed, and edited report text file from the SD card's /tangled/birds_of_NA/admin/report directory to the SD card's /tangled/birds_of_NA/phenotypic/attribute/gender_appearance directory,
• select the class list's 'select/link' menu item,
• verify that the new attribute is listed in the attribute list,
• verify that checks can project to/from the new attribute, and
• (optionally) submit the new attribute file to the Tangled field guide users group that will consider whether it should be included in the officially distributed phenotypic directory.  If it is included, you and the source of the information will get a portion of the phenotypic directory royalties whenever the birds of North America multimedia is purchased.

Similarly, you can add a Tangled sort order option by performing the steps to add a Tangled attribute, except that you must add value range fields when you edit the created attribute file, and you must copy the resulting value range attribute to the /tangled/birds_of_NA/phenotypic/attribute/value_range directory.

When species are along a trail and are stationary, the ideal species identification process is not at all.  With local maps, Tangled will announce previously identified species as they are passed.  For example, "Bloodroot to your left."

The Android version of the Tangled field guide is in development and will be released shortly.  A couple preview videos are available now.  The first is a general background of field guides, the other demonstrates some of the scrolling capabilities of the Android version of Tangled.

If you would like to receive an email notice when a Tangled port to Android is available, register here.

A port of Tangled to iPhone is planned.  Meanwhile, it may be possible to emulate the Tangled application within jailbroken iPhones: StyleTap has recently released a PalmOS application emulator for jailbroken iPhones.  As of yet, no Tangled users have reported how well the Tangled emulation on the iPhone works.

If you would like to receive an email notice when the Tangled port to iPhone is available, register here.

Tangled application

• version 10.8.1
• 1.3 Mbyte PalmOS installer application download
• free
• Run this installer application to install the Tangled field guide application.  A necessary component for the Tangled application is the phenotypic directory, which you should download (8.1 Mbyte) and unzip to your SD card.  An optional component for the Tangled application is the multimedia directory, which you can purchase.

Tangled Sighting (TS) application

• version 10.8.1
• 470 Kbyte PalmOS installer application download
• free
• The Tangled sighting application is optional, for users interested in logging information about their sightings of species.  Run this installer application to install the Tangled sighting application, which is basically a data entry form to efficiently log sightings to standard spreadsheet files on the SD card.  TS is efficient because it automatically fills many of the sighting fields (e.g., time, date, and location if a GPS receiver is connected).

Tangled Differential Update (TDU) utility for Microsoft Windows OS

• version 10.3.1
• 67 Kbyte zipped download
• free utility and source (GNU GPL)
• The TDU utility is optional.  It makes SD card updates faster (typically, a factor of 10 faster) by reducing the number of SD card write operations.

trail frame application

• version 10.2.1
• 114 Kbyte application download
• free
• The trail frame application is optional, for those interested in accurately mapping their local trails.  It logs NMEA sentences from your GPS receiver every second and user generated sentences concerning trail intersections, as they are encountered, into a spreadsheet (.csv) file on the SD card.  The same trail should be "framed" many times in order for long term averaging of the GPS readings to result in an accurate trail map.

A port of Tangled to WebOS javascript is planned.  Meanwhile, it is possible to emulate the Tangled application within WebOS: a Tangled user has reported that the PalmOS version of Tangled is fully functional, except for the Tangled sighting application's ability to connect with a GPS receiver, in the MotionApps Classic PalmOS emulator running on WebOS devices.

If you would like to receive an email notice when the Tangled port to WebOS is available, register here.

The Tangled field guide was initially developed to run on Palm OS devices and is now being ported to Android devices.  Ports to other devices are also planned.  If you would like to receive an email notice when a port is available for your device, register here.