#merlin app

Merlin.

Yes, Merlin is widely used amongst birdwatchers, and I have used it to help with bird surveys in Peru and here in Texas.

* You have to be careful though, because Merlin can be wrong up to 50% of the time in some situations, so you use it as an aid, not the hard core be all/end all data.

I do recommend it to anyone interested in birdwatching. I've found birds that I wouldn't have looked for otherwise.

Here is the bird that its named after:

Merlin (Falco columbarius), family Falconidae, order Falconiformes, Western U.S.

I am, broadly speaking, Aware Of the wild birds in my area. I'm what you might call "birder adjacent"; multiple family members are birders. My mother tried to teach me birdcalls for YEARS and was never able to fully understand that, to me,

TWEET TWEEEEET CHirP and Tweet TWEet CHriP

are just functionally indistinguishable. She and my brother had/have perfect pitch and I do not, which may have played into this issue. Whenever Aunt L talks about birding with me, I nod supportively and ask leading questions. Her expectations of me are low and realistic LOL.

However, now that K has gotten into birding due to an assignment in her animal behavior class, I have found something interesting. Yeah tho my ear is not terrific, I am a hella-good visual learner. 👏 Modern Birders use apps such as Merlin on their phones to learn birdcalls. 👏 Merlin shows you a spectrogram (boy it took me a while to find that word) of the birdcall. Suddenly, instead of dealing with audio-only

(my brain: |NO| )

I can see the darned noise happening! Which is kinda awesome.

Which is to say, Baltimore Orioles have a song that ends with three wide, descending diagonal bars on a spectrogram. And now I know when I hear them, because my brain translates the song into a picture, and then is willing to attach a name to it. Baltimore Oriole!

Jeez.

Separate issue; I never paid much attention to crows/ravens. I knew they were distinct, but didn't know the keys to telling them apart until I saw a post a few years back on Tumblr. Of course. For some reason, this year we have a LOT of ravens around the valley. Great, hulking birds with hoarse voices; I'm seeing them all the time. Even saw a crow chasing one above the yard one day, which was a sight.

I heard a

- European Robin

- Eurasian Blackbird

- Rook

- Great Tit (lol)

- Common Wood Pigeon

- Great Spotted Woodpecker