What’s the best thing on my phone? The Merlin Bird ID app. It listens and tells you (with reasonable accuracy) what birds are around you. Recently I heard someone singing who I didn’t immediately recognize, but I thought sounded fluty and musical, like a thrush. Merlin agreed: Swainson’s thrush, a new bird for me.
In the olden days, my family had LPs of bird songs. If you listened to it, you’d hear the man’s voice saying the name of the bird, the bird singing, then the name of the next bird, its song, and so forth. I am sure there are people that can learn this way, but I am not one of them.
Merlin has turned bird sounds into flashcards. I listen to the sound, I make a guess, I ask my phone, and it tells me if I was right or not. It’s just like learning vocabulary in a foreign language.
So that’s how I know that a Swainson’s thrush sang on my urban block for four days in a row this week. Even though it mostly sings from the leafy treetops where it’s very hard to see. But since I knew it was there, I did go out with my binoculars one morning and peer into the tree until it decided to hop down to a bare lower branch. I hope my neighbors didn’t think that was weird. I hope they’d be happy to know about the musical bird in their backyard.
What’s the best thing on your phone?
Image: Screenshot from Merlin app, featuring a performance by my local Swainson’s thrush
Merlin, hands down. It’s is the only reasonable excuse for owning a smart phone at all (except for a macro-lens camera for taking photos of jumping spiders, of course).
Yesterday I heard a new bird for my neighborhood, which hasn’t happened in a while. It was a chipping sparrow. They are only in the SF Bay Area during breeding season. My Merlin had identified this species once before, in Idaho, so not a new addition to my life list, but still very cool.
How many are on your life list? I have 152 so far (since 2021).