South Africa is one of the top destinations in the world for bird watching. From the total of about 10000 of bird species,850 species are to be found here. Kwazulu-Natal in particular is one of the richest regions supporting a wide array of different birds, while the Western Cape is another very popular destination. Bird song recordings are available on a large number of internet sites. A rich collection is for example freely available on http://www.xeno‐canto.org/collection/area/africa. Mobile phone applications for bird watchers are currently being developed, see for example http://www.sasolbirds.co.za/mobile‐app.php for the “eBirds” of Southern Africa. Some of these applications include also bird song recognition. For example https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/bird‐song‐id‐usa‐automatic/id681091523?mt=8 is a commercially available application recognizing 156 birds of the Eastern USA. The main intention of this project is to develop a birdsong recognition system for African birds, based on a novel method for time series recognition, namely reservoir computing using nonlinear delay units. Reservoir computing seems to be particularly well suited for such a problem. It is a leading technology for speech recognition and the version based on nonlinear delay units is presently being implemented for the analysis of electro‐cardiac signals.
