I've been doing a lot of bird watching lately. Well, bird watching and bird listening. I really like the free Merlin app from Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
For years, I used Merlin as a database of local birds to peruse, comparing what I saw to the photos.
I knew it had an automatic sound ID feature, but I refused to use it. Isn't using AI for birdwatching cheating?
I also assumed it needed Internet access to work, and usually out West when I hear an interesting bird I'm in some remote campground or dispersed camping on National Forest or BLM land and can't even get texts. I recognize a few bird calls, like crows (“caw”) and chickadees (“chicka dee dee dee”).
We went on a bird walk with a lovely volunteer, a real birder, who used the sound ID in the app in addition to being familiar with the birds in the local area. We saw like twenty kestrels on that walk near Mono Lake. I'd never identified a kestrel before. That's the magic of learning from other people's experience.
A couple weeks later, I was at a marina. Birds were twittering and flying from tree to tree. A night heron was cleaning a wing, sitting in a tree.
I didn't know what the flock of small birds was. I opened Merlin and pressed the Sound ID button. What the heck, I thought. Let's see.
