The idea for the creation
I use Merlin Bird ID, the app from Cornell’s Ornithology Lab, constantly. I love identifying the birds around me, but maybe what I love even more is that it keeps a log of every bird you encounter. As a kid who was obsessed with Pokémon, sometimes it feels like Merlin is my personal Pokédex. I love looking at these birds that come in all different shapes, sizes, amazing colors, and the fun facts about them. That feeling is where I got the idea for the app.
The other half of it
Dementia has affected multiple people really close to me. As someone who got their PhD in biology and loves observing the world around me, it changed what I notice about “noticing.” Most of the scientific process is observation: the ability to look at something in detail, hold it, and compare it to something else. Shapes, colors, or in Charles Darwin’s case, birds. It is the quiet machinery we use constantly without realizing, the thing most of us call “attention.” And I guess it is one of those things you don’t notice until it starts to go.
I want to be careful here, because as a scientist I don’t want to mislead anyone. The research on whether cognitive training transfers to real world outcomes is genuinely mixed, and I am not going to tell anyone that a game like this prevents dementia. What is true is that fast visual identification and working memory tasks do show up in real cognitive training research, and that many doctors recommend daily mentally engaging activities. I took those as a starting point, not as a claim about what this game will do.
Regardless, I know that daily routines help some people, and building a reason to practice noticing small things felt worth doing. When I combined that with Merlin, birds seemed like the obvious subject. The proof is that birders have been doing this for decades without anyone telling them to, because I think the scientific term for it is: “SO. MUCH. FUN.”
What the game actually is
Birds fly across the screen and you tap the species on your watchlist before the timer runs out. That’s it.
I tried to capture the feeling of actual birding (with a lot of help from the r/birding and r/whatsthisbird communities). It starts easy, and then the species start to look alike, and you realize you are doing what birders do: looking at the birds’ features like shape, size, and colors. Different species live in different habitats, so I sorted them into the places they belong. Hopefully it can also help people learn about identifying these species without them even noticing, like how some language learning apps work. And more importantly, the love for birding can spread to new people (or dare I say, generations?).
Everything you find fills in a field notebook: 106 species (for now, with more coming!), each that I made in Procreate, with some information about the species, and a fun fact. I was trying to achieve the same joy I get from Merlin, and I thank them for the inspiration.
What I got wrong
After I shared the app with some bird communities on Reddit, some birders pointed out something I had completely missed: nearly every bird in the game is male.
I promise it wasn’t a deliberate choice. I looked at reference photos and picked the ones that would look distinct at pixel resolution. But that made me accidentally select the males’ photos almost every time. Hence, I missed half of the bird population.
It is true that female and juvenile birds are harder to tell apart for a lot of species. But then I realized that is exactly the point of the game. That is the real skill, and v1.0 was teaching the easy version of it. So that is what I will work on next, along with some other ideas people have suggested. If you have more feedback and suggestions, I am always happy to hear them!
Practical things
Perchwise is free, with no ads and no accounts. I built it alone, in my spare time, with a mission in mind. If people like it and want more, I would like to keep adding to it: more species, more regions, and the practice/zen/different game modes people have been asking for.
I tried to make a game for everyone, for all ages and accessibilities I could think of, with options to change the motion, speed, and size of the birds. If you see anything wrong (and some Redditors did tell me some mistakes about the species’ features or fun facts) or have ideas for more accessibility options, please let me know! I appreciate all the people who did and made the game better already.
— Eray Enustun