The app’s home screen
I’m just addicted to the Merlin app’s new Sound ID feature. Whenever I’m outside, walking my daily 10,000 steps or sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee, I hit the green button to see who’s out there singing.
I’ve struggled for years just to learn the repertoires of all the sparrows and warblers. Most of them still elude me. Speaking of 10,000 steps, translated to hours, that’s about what it would take for to me to learn all of the 456 species that Merlin recognizes in a snap.
Last week Anders and I did a Zoom workshop on the Sound ID feature in the Merlin app for a group of seniors in Washington, D.C. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology added sound recognition to its free Merlin ID app a few months ago, promising real-time suggestions for the songs and calls of 456 bird species in North America. Most of our workshop attendees were new to the app and eager to learn the finer points of how to get the most out of this powerful tool.
Right off the bat I should tell you that while Sound ID is truly amazing, it isn’t perfect. Based on our own experiences with the app while traveling across the country this summer — plus questions from the workshop – we’re using this post to add some pointers to my “Beverly’s Basics” page here on Flying Lessons.
Tap the microphone to begin.
Before we get started, if you aren’t familiar with Sound ID, please click here for our recent post that covers how to install the app on your phone or iPad, and here for the Cornell lab’s basic tutorial.
For those of us who don’t love learning a new technology, here’s a bit of incentive: According to a recent study by the National Park Service and several universities, birdsong reduces your stress more than any other sound in nature. (Click here for the study.) Listening to birds can be even more enjoyable if you know which birds are singing. Sound ID is especially useful in a dense forest and other landscapes where it’s way easier to hear birds than to see them.
Merlin also feels like a personal tutor when you’re starting out trying to learn birdsongs, and it’s a fun and effective way to make progress no matter where you are in learning to recognize songs.
Merlin works best when you’re fairly close to the birds – especially when the birds are making chip calls instead of singing. Unless it’s extremely noisy, Sound ID will work. It recognizes birds in the midst of most extraneous sounds, including normal conversation, barking dogs and even lawnmowers. But again, you need to be fairly close, and I hope the lab can find a way to extend the range over time. Merlin is really good at recognizing hawks and crows even when they’re pretty far away, so there’s hope!
A fascinating new book by Jennifer Ackerman, The Bird Way, A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent and Think, says birds have a rich social life. She says the language of birds can be complicated, emotional, and has its own syntax. This book suggests that birds will even lie at times, implying a level of sophistication far beyond what we always thought.
Birdsongs are primarily about mating and defending territory, but exchanges like this one that seem more like household conversations are part of the repertoire as well. The Cornell Lab’s Handbook of Bird Biology, the bible of bird life, says bird pairs of all kinds are constantly seen singing duets, chatting back and forth and sometimes simply working on their relationships by staying in close touch.
You can usually hear the Ovenbird from a long way off. Its piercing, crystal clear voice cuts through the woods as if singing through a sound system at a Broadway theater.
The Ovenbird is so loud and consistent that researchers have turned to its songs when needing to study bird audio. The most famous findings dates back to 1958. 
