Birding Western Mass: Merlin App Considered

Thoughts on Birding from the Quabbin to the Berkshires

Merlin in Western Mass and the World

Using an AI app to recognize birdsong is transforming our hobby.

I started listening to birdsong when I was less than 10 years old. My grandmother knew some of the songs of the birds in her yard on the North Side in Richmond, Virginia, where I spent my life until I went to college. The one I know she could name was the Carolina wren, which was only then beginning to expand north to where we have it now.

I’m 58. I identify birds by ear now with a skill that seems difficult to credit to novices and non-birders.

Meanwhile, some expert birders are even better than me — a few, a LOT better. I’m still learning. We all have different skills. I hear better than I see. I can’t avoid listening in the way that others can’t avoid feeling or loving or watching.

(I’m sitting in a suburb of Nashville and listening to a mockingbird. This bird has, in the time I’ve been listening to it, “done” the standards for its species — wren, jay, robin — and also a few deep cuts, including a white-eyed vireo, a kestrel, a phoebe and a pewee.)

I also happen to be a technology analyst at a company called Gartner. My day job there now is entirely focused on covering artificial intelligence. I was the first person to lead Gartner’s AI agenda. I spend much of my day on AI strategy and the impacts that AI has on the culture of organizations. Also: I read obsessively about evolution and cultures of intelligence in animals and plant kingdoms (yes, I said “plant”).

AI recognition of birdsong mesmerizes me.

Have you read this far hoping I would get soon to whether the Merlin app is “good” or “bad”? If so, allow me to offer a spoiler: AI is now more like a force of nature and less like a choice. The AI-averse can hunker down and seek to avoid and exclude it from their days. But it’s potent; its effects seep in; it’s better observed and interpreted than resisted.

Resistance may not be futile but inquiry is both harder and more valuable.

Basic Merlin

Let’s look at the absolute basic Merlin experience (as of today; it’s recently changed quite a lot) for a moment.

If you download the app to your phone and install it, you can turn it on and it will listen to everything where you are. (It’s not listening to what’s happening where you are unless you turn it on. It does record everything when it is on. I feel like that will make a super clue in a murder mystery some day.)

It only filters for birdsong right now. That means that if it hears a gray squirrel call that sounds like a bird, it won’t tell you that. You just stare disbelievingly at the phone while it fails to tell you what sounds exactly like a bird.

A recent feature now also creates a short description of some of the birds you hear, often with an image and a suggestion of where to look to see the bird (such as “Look up! This bird is often in the treetops!”)

More on this in a moment.

Good for beginning bird listeners

Is this good for beginners? Here’s the first time I’ll say this, but not the last: What kind of birding are you trying to do?

What Merlin does for beginners, which might include you, is it makes it easier to sort out what’s happening around you, even if it’s hard or impossible to see that.

Merlin is better able to:

• Differentiate overlapping birdsong

• Make highly educated guesses when the listener does not know where to start

• Grant a sense of the rich world of birds around the listener

I’ll spare you the math I just went through to sort this out (and I needed a dose of AI to do it), but as far as I can tell, if I can see a sparrow sized bird about 50 feet away from me, it takes up an extremely small percentage of my view — much less than 1%, probably less than .001% of my view. It’s amazing that I can focus so quickly on such an object. (It helps if the object moves.)

But of course, I can hear so much more. Not only can I hear what is in my field of vision, I can hear what isn’t. And even with the misery of the ambient noise around me, I can still hear birdsong. So can Merlin, huzzah!

For most birders, the first question is, What am I seeing? The next is often, Where do I look?

So, for people who answer the question, What kind of birding are you trying to do? with the answer I want to know where I am in a world of birds then Merlin is amazing. If the answer is I want to know when it’s worth looking up or down or wherever then it’s amazing.

If they say, I want to see birds that are silent then Merlin is no help. If they say, I want to know with zero possibility of being wrong what bird is singing then Merlin is a ton less help. Merlin gets some birds wrong often and it does not warn you about that — it misidentifies mockingbirds and brown thrashers in my personal experience and other examples are rife with a little Googling.

Merlin’s mistakes are quite rare in comparison to a new birder. They are quite frequent in comparison to a seasoned birder who is good by ear.

There is an important exception here.

If you want to learn how to listen to birds to ID them, then Merlin may make it too easy for you.

Great for Intermediate Bird Listeners

If you know what to listen for, Merlin is wonderful at hearing things you’re unsure of and offering you thoughts about what it might be. You can peel through the songs you hear daily or regularly and keep an eye on your phone for things you didn’t know to listen for.

You can use the feature of Merlin that flares the bird in its working list while it is singing — this lets you listen more closely to hear the bird you might want to see (or that you only care to hear). You can stop the recording and then tap the species that Merlin claims to have heard, comparing your recording to Merlin’s typical recording of the species.

Mind-Bogglingly Good for researchers

For scientists who need to know when birds of given species are present, Merlin offers unprecedented value. You can set it to record and analyze for presence (when the bird is singing — Merlin does not count silent birds).

For these scientists, Merlin offers a documented, testable transparent understanding of a place in ways that were simply impossible before now. Merlin-powered devices are under development (or may be available now, for all I know) and so scientists can know more about places that are remote or large or difficult to visit.

Why Birders tell you Merlin is bad for you

Merlin gives you a digital boost that is life-changing. I went out with other birders for years to get started with birdsong, and then, because I really prefer being alone when I bird, I spent decades hearing birds and then looking for them to connect the song to the species — also using the occasional recorded calls for comparison, as well as the way calls are turned into readable nonsense words (Carolina wren says “tea kettle, tea kettle, tea!”)

Most birders today learned their birdsong in this kind of commitment. It builds community and it brings people together. Telling birds apart by ear is hard. It’s as remarkable a skill as imagining a flavor you can create with spices and herbs (I can’t) or being able to draw pictures of things (I really can’t) or being able to write a clear document (I can). It takes practice.

Merlin seems to make that too easy — and, it gets it wrong sometimes. The fact that humans get it wrong sometimes doesn’t seem as consequential as when software does. I don’t know why that is, but I know it is, and I have seen data from surveys to prove it.

I get brown thrashers and brown creepers wrong all the time. I have literally been birding for 50 years and I have a hard time with house finches.

What kind of birding are you trying to do? If you want to be like me, listening to the connections between different turdus thrushes’ songs and speculating about when the species diverged, or listening to catbirds to see if they’re mimicking or riffing or making stuff up, or trying to learn the differences between Carolina wrens’ species (subspecies?) songs in Brownsville, Texas, then Merlin is not always for you.

If you are interested in understanding the world you are in, and like have a feeling of the habitat you’re in, and maybe want to get notification of unusual birds nearby you didn’t know to look for, then Merlin is for you.

What kind of birding are you trying to do?

Here’s a really big idea: Maybe birding for you does not need to include identifying individual species fast and looking for rare species.

I want everyone to feel like they can enjoy birding for their own reasons. It does not have to be about ID’ing birds! It does not have to include binoculars! It does not have to include seeing rare birds and knowing they are rare!

The older I get, the more I submerge myself in the place where I am. When I have hours to watch for birds and listen for them, I feel so happy. I stood in a field last winter and listened and watched for owls (I did not see any or hear any) and I saw harriers work the field north to south and felt part of the place where I was. I also heard the harrier. I know that was what I heard because Merlin told me. At that moment I could not see it.

If using Merlin makes you happy, use it. Don’t feel guilty. Observe your usage and imagine that people could not do it before the way they can now.

• If you want to see the birds more, be still and watch for them. You will discover occasionally that Merlin was wrong. You may often find it was right! (I had it tell me to look for kestrels this week: I did, and then I saw them!)

• If you want to ID birds by listening, then watch the screen while Merlin tells you what you hear. Close your eyes and listen. Let the birdsong surround you. You can learn to hear where you are.

• You may find that ID’ing birds is no longer the central part of your birding. Whoa. That’s an amazing thing.

I really appreciate your reading this. I hope it helps you think about Merlin. It helped me to write it.