Merlin Sound ID is one handy birding helper
Summertime birding just got a lot more interesting for amateurs
Our morning of “Atlasing,” saw the hour hand climbing toward Noon. The sun grew uncomfortably warm, and we prayed for the relief of a light breeze—any breeze. Oh, the humidity!
Within one of my survey blocks for the Sutton Avian Research Center’s Breeding Bird Atlas is a Mayes County public boat ramp. I thought it might be a nice place to park for a little while, maybe find a lakeside breeze, and maybe spot a bald eagle or a belted kingfisher for the birding list.
DeAnna, my beautiful birding partner of 38 years, chose to wait in the car with some shade and the windows down, and I was happy to jump out and leave my 10-and-a-half-pound camera in the backseat. It felt good to hop out without that heavy camera strap on my sweaty shoulder.
All I took with me were my binoculars and my new favorite birding buddy, Merlin, who I immediately called out as he quickly started listing bird after bird after bird.
“Oh, bull! It’s mockingbirds, give it a rest.”
Merlin is an online birding app created by the fine folks at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It’s an eBird app companion piece generated on the backs of millions of sightings entered into that popular app, and it gets better and better with time. I resisted it for awhile. I thought it kind of an elementary bird identification method with so-so illustrations. I favored my own ears, eyes, and my trusty old Sibley Guide to Birds.
Stick with what has always worked, right?
Wrong.
Over the past year, Merlin has become my best friend in the birding fields and woods, especially in its ability to identify bird songs that, let’s face it, my ears don’t locate as readily as they did 20 years ago. Birding is thought of as mostly a visual activity, but a greater percentage of it depends on your ear, sensing motion and knowing where to look once those senses tell you something might be around. That’s especially true in summer, when the foilage is thick and birds are simply hard to see.
The app can help users identify birds with options for step-by-step description, by uploading a photo, or by picking up sounds with the simple microphone in your mobile device. Not only does it identify a bird call, a user can click on the bird it displays to learn more with photos, distribution maps, and sound recordings to hear on-the-spot to understand more.
It’s pretty darned cool, but much like a field guide, it’s still just another tool, that is handy to have in your shirt pocket.
Let me repeat. In your shirt pocket.
Don’t go walking around in the woods staring at your phone, and that defeats the purpose of enjoying the day outside. Also, holding that stupid phone in your hand will reflect light and flash like a mirror in the sun, which may cost you good sightings.
Merlin has upped my confidence by increasing my ability to find birds with the bird song ID option. Simple as that. It’s great, too, because if I’m out alone, it gives me someone to debate with and cuss at.
Walk around in the woods arguing with yourself, and people might think you’re a little touched. But what if you have a phone in your hand?
All good. Chat away.
To be clear, you can’t just walk out in the woods, turn on the Merlin app sound-ID and expect it to accurately record every species within earshot. Sure, I’ve left it sitting out a time or two when I’m busy doing something else, then come back to see what’s on the list. It’s fun and interesting to see what might be around, but it’s not an accurate way to create a list.
That said, it has increased my confidence enough that I decided to pitch in and take a couple of sections in this summer’s Breeding Bird Atlas surveys for the Sutton Avian Research Center. I signed up to cover two of the 583 statewide Atlas blocks, each roughly 3 miles square, to be documented within the 5 years of Atlas surveys. This is the last summer for surveys, with about 120 remaining blocks on the docket.
Volunteers spend a minimum of 10 hours in each block between April and August (but mostly in early May and June) to document species present as well as their behaviors relative to nesting—such as carrying nest materials, food for young, singing or mating displays, etc.
It is a serious effort that will provide information for the next Oklahoma Breeding Bird Atlas, to be compiled by Dan Reinking, a senior biologist at Sutton. His last Breeding Bird Atlas was published twenty years ago. More recently, he completed the Oklahoma Winter Bird Atlas in 2017. These books contain a wealth of information about our state’s birds and are important records specific to the health and status of Oklahoma’s birds. They’re pretty cool coffee-table books, too.
What I’m enjoying in this endeavor is adding meaning to my birding outings. I’m not just finding and tallying birds; I have a reason to sit and watch individuals and figure out what they’re up to. My competitive nature is kicking in a little bit, too. I’m on a nest hunt!
When DeAnna isn’t with me, I typically walk into the field with my camera, my binoculars, and my iPhone running three apps: Merlin, eBird, and OnX Hunt. OnX is a hunting app that is invaluable for viewing property lines and for instant references to land ownership.
Merlin and eBird are free apps anyone can download at the App Store or through Cornell the website. OnX Hunt requires a subscription, but if you’re looking for public lands, it’s priceless. If a private landowner gives you permission to explore their place, it helps keep you on the right side of the fence and track where you’ve been. You can also set GPS tags on points you might want to return to, be it a busy bird site or an easy creek crossing.
Decent binoculars and plenty of patience still are important, however. People always want to know about optics, so here’s that field list for me.
Bushnell 8X40 binocs—I prefer 10X50 Vortex, but my good ones were stolen from my truck, and I don’t want to talk about it.
The Canon 1DX with 300mm F/2.8 and 1.4X multiplier (the aforementioned 10-1/2-pound beast) is typically set to 3,200 or 4,000/sec and f/8 to f10 with auto ISO for catching useful pictures to ID birds I don’t recognize. I switch to manual everything if I’m trying to shoot quality pics.
I have yet to invest in a good spotting scope, but I need one.
Having Merlin along is like walking into the woods with a buddy who has a great ear for bird calls but is perhaps a little over-enthusiastic and sometimes easily, repeatedly fooled. That is especially true in the presence of mimics like mockingbirds or a flock of European starlings, even crows and blue jays. Users also need to be aware there is plenty of overlap in bird songs that even experienced birers struggle with.
Painted buntings and indigo buntings are common around eastern Oklahoma and have similar songs. Often, Merlin will show both at the same time. And sometimes the two are in close proximity, but not always.
I usually try to distinguish on my own, then click on Merlin for confirmation a few times. Ideally, I either see the bird or listen to enough calls that I feel confident in the audible recognition.
The app can be flat wrong, however. One time I was with my Lab, Whiskey while using the app. I whistled at him lightly and when I checked the app later it indicated it detected a bald eagle.
One morning, behind my house, I heard the nasal call of a fish crow in the distance. But the Merlin app displayed a white-breasted nuthatch, which also has a short nasal call but is a tiny little bird that looks nothing like a crow.
It’s not impossible to see a nuthatch near my home, so both might have been present, but I didn’t hear or see a nuthatch. As I watched the app, the background behind that nuthatch ID line flashed yellow every time I heard that distant crow.
When things like that happen, I hit “cancel” and start over again.
On our morning at the boat ramp, before I rounded the car and walked to the edge of the lake, Merlin popped up with a northern mockingbird, which was obvious because two of them were absolutely going nuts in a tree right next to the car. But, in a flash, it also listed eastern kingbird, yellow warbler, Baltimore Oriole, and a few others, about eight in all.
That’s when I called BS.
“You’re hearing mockingbirds; give it a rest,” I said.
But as I scanned the nearby trees, sure enough, an eastern kingbird sat high on an exposed limb directly above me. A second kingbird rounded the tree, slammed on the brakes with that signature flycatcher family agility, and disappeared into the lower branches. And, just like that, I had documented a breeding pair of kingbirds and found their nest.
Not bad for less than a minute outside the car.
I hit “cancel” on the Merlin sound app. And up popped the same list of again. I remained incredulous, and those danged mockingbirds were just going nuts.
But as mockingbirds finally moved off, sure enough, I heard the Baltimore oriole across the lake. An oriole’s song is one of those I recognize but often struggle to recall without a prompt. When I was a kid, we always had orioles nesting in the big maple tree outside our house, so it’s a song I grew up with and remember, especially if someone points it out. For me the oriole’s song is kind of like meeting a past acquaintance whose face is familiar, but the name just doesn’t come to you right away.
With its bright orange and black plumage, it was only a matter of time until I had visual confirmation of the oriole on the other side of the lake.
But still, a yellow warbler? They like low brushy areas near water but, I just wasn’t hearing it. I kept eyeing the brush with my binoculars but wasn’t seeing it, either.
I hit “cancel” on the app again, and again, it popped up with Kingbird, Baltimore Oriole, and Yellow Warbler, plus the others—Canada goose, American crow, northern cardinal, Amerian robin, you know, the usual crowd.
I’d spent enough time, counted several other species, and was ready to roll without noting the yellow warbler on my list when, naturally, a bright yellow dot left the opposite shoreline, flew right towards me, landed low in a cottonwood not 30 feet away, and sat there singing, looking right at me, plain as day, loud as can be. It was clearly a yellow warbler; no binoculars or apps were required for confirmation on that one.
It was like Merlin just wanted to say, “I told ya so. Ya idiot!”
And, of course, my camera was in the car.
Went to Wichita mountains for Black capped vireo. No internet. No cell phone. No trails app. But found one! The old fashioned way.