Merlin

 

 

Hey, I figured something out.

 

There is this cool birding app for the phone called Merlin.  Turn it on and let it listen.  It picks out bird calls and identifies them.  It’s fairly new technology.  It’s not always right, and it takes some discretion and skepticism when evaluating its results, but it’s another good tool in the kit.

 

I was surprised however, while sitting there listening to a mockingbird and Merlin wasn’t identifying it.  A singing mockingbird isn’t that hard to I.D.  How can an app that can pick out a birdsong I can barely hear, or identify a little pip from the bushes that sounds like every other little pip, not identify a mockingbird, one of our most conspicuous birds?  I wondered about that a little bit but didn’t obsess over it and let it go.

 

Recently however, while I was again listening to a mockingbird sing, the explanation just came to me.  That blinding flash of the obvious!  Northern mockingbirds sing 200 different songs.  Mockingbirds are so good at what they do, if they trained Merlin to recognize every song a mockingbird sings, there would hardly be any other birds left to identify.  Merlin would think every bird it heard, whatever the location or habitat, was a Mockingbird!  Merlin can leave the really easy bird I.D.s to us to figure out on our own and focus on the ones we might need help with.