The lighter side of life – staying in touch with friends and family by celebrating the ordinary.
Merlin Bird ID
My Merlin Bird ID phone application is amazing! It’s a free app from The Cornell Lab and it’s the most fun thing I’ve gotten in a long time. It’s the first of three new nature identification phone apps I’ve gotten this year and I’ve been meaning to blog about them because I think you’ll like them too.
The Merlin Bird ID app looks like this:
Here’s an example of a recording I took in February. You can see the sonogram readout on top, corresponding to the bird songs it’s recording.
In my neighborhood there’s often several birds singing at once. It will highlight in yellow the ones it is hearing at that moment.
If a bird is unexpected or rare for that time or place, it will note that too. A red dot means rare and an orange semi-circle means uncommon. That’s to alert you because the app isn’t perfect and might be mistaken. Or, you might want to start looking around and see if you can do a visual confirmation. You might have found something exciting!
One morning, I ran the recording at 9:43am for 2 minutes and 30 seconds and got 7 different kinds of birds!
House Sparrow
Mourning Dove
Lesser Goldfinch
House Finch
Gila Woodpecker
Northern Mockingbird
Ash-throated Flycatcher
Then I stopped the recording because an airplane was flying overhead. I restarted it a couple of minutes later and got most of the above birds again plus three more kinds of birds!
Verdin
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Eurasian Collared-Dove
That’s 10 different birds in 7 minutes! In my own backyard! In February! The number of types of birds in Tucson in the middle of the winter is a really amazing surprise for me. And now I can start to learn what I’m hearing!
I went back out a couple of hours later – in the middle of the day. I didn’t expect much in the middle of the day. But I heard 5 of the same sorts of birds I had heard in the morning, plus a new one: Pine Siskin.
I’ve never heard of a Pine Siskin! Which doesn’t mean much. I don’t know my birds. Before I moved here, I could pretty much only identify an owl and a crow. Speaking of crows, a couple of minutes later I got two more birds!
Common Raven
Anna’s Hummingbird
And a Pine Siskin again! So yes, ok that is apparently a thing. The Anna’s Hummingbird is very common here in the winter, I’ve been getting those every day.
At 2:00 that afternoon I got, in addition to the Lesser Goldfinch and the House Finch:
Red-winged Blackbird
Vermilion Flycatcher
Broad-billed Hummingbird
Then at 6:00 I got a Great Horned Owl. For a total of 17 different kinds of birds in one day! And I didn’t spend hours and hours recording. I just stepped outside between chores a few times, and ran the app for just a couple of minutes at a time. It’s truly amazing.
It’s starting to get addictive. The next morning I ran the app for 3 minutes around 8:30am and got 9 birds.
Nine different kinds of birds in a 3 minute recording!
Mourning Dove
House Sparrow
Lesser Goldfinch
House Finch
Verdin
Northern Mockingbird
Anna’s Hummingbird
Ash-throated Flycatcher
American Robin
Before this app, I enjoyed the sounds of the birds in Tucson in the winter, but I had no idea how many different birds I was hearing.
An hour later I went out for 5 minutes and recorded:
House Sparrow
Lesser Goldfinch
Vermilion Flycatcher
Northern Mockingbird
House Finch
Broad-billed Hummingbird
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Anna’s hummingbird
Verdin
A total of 12 different kinds of birds that morning. There will be others in the afternoon and evening. This app is so addictive!
As far as I can tell, the app doesn’t do a very good job of listing all my observations. I just have to scroll through all my recordings:
I’ve been putting all the birds I’ve heard into a spreadsheet, which rather clunky. Here’s my list so far since January, 40 birds! All of them I heard here in Tucson, and most of them I heard from my own backyard!
Albert’s Towhee
American Pipit
American Robin
Ash-throated Flycatcher
Black-throated Sparrow
Brewer’s Blackbird
Broad-billed Hummingbird
Brown-headed Cowbird
Cactus Wren
Common Raven
Cooper’s Hawk
Costa’s Hummingbird
Curve-billed Thrasher
Eurasion Collared-Dove
Gila Woodpecker
Great Horned Owl
Great-tailed Grackle
House Finch
House Sparrow
Lark Sparrow
Lesser Goldfinch
Lucy’s Warbler
Mourning Dove
Northern Cardinal
Northern Flicker
Northern Mockingbird
Phainopepla
Pine Siskin
Red-winged Blackbird
Rufous-winged Sparrow
Tree Swallow
Verdin
Vermilion Flycatcher
Vesper Sparrow
White-crowned Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
White-winged Dove
Yellow Warbler
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Ideally, if I was serious, what I want to do is get a different Cornell Lab app called eBird, but I haven’t done that yet. I think it’s for reporting rather than identifying. And I’m just happy that the Merlin app tells me what birds I’m hearing. I’m not actually a serious birder. I’m so lucky to live somewhere with birdsong all winter long!
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