Merlin Bird ID

Not sure what you mean - both the "Explore" part and the Life List both have the pics and the calls together?

It is indeed a good app, but my beef is how bad it is at adding birds to your life list. After ID'ing a bird by sound or picture it'll ask you where/when you found it with the worst defaults -- it'll know where you are and what time it is, but it sometimes randomly picks some time/place you've been at months ago (even ignoring that you may have just entered several at your current location)!

Welcome to your forties, where bird fascination is a right of passage! XD

iNaturalist is another gem. Hackers please support these apps so they don’t turn into the AllTrails and Couchsurfing type rackets that we deserve.

Yes! It's a rare example of an app that instead of trying to capture your attention into a virtual environment, helps you to direct it outwards into the real world.

The sound id in particular is just an amazing way to really extend what's possible for most people, and provides an on-ramp for people to identify more birds by ear alone (and in general to pay more attention to sound when in nature).

I might argue that Merlin — and especially eBird — lean a bit to heavily to the competitive "high scores" view of birding; given the impact of climate change on bird populations, encouraging people to travel the world and see as many species as possible is clearly problematic.

But that's a minor quibble, and Merlin remains one of the few apps I'd unconditionally recommend to anyone with the faintest chance they'd use it.

I'm definitely impressed with the sound ID. One time there was a cacophony of birds singing outside my house at varying distances, and the app was able to identify 6 different bird species within 30 seconds. All 6 suggestions seemed reasonable to me.

I was really impressed when I took a trip to England and it recognized european birds. At one point it said there was a Rose-ringed Parakeet which seemed totally wrong, but then we saw a bunch of them in Hyde park a couple days later.

The iOS app did seem to lock up when trying to download the region packs though. I should find out where to file a bug!

Someone near my house has a rooster that does his thing every morning. And every morning I look at the app hoping to see him pop up in the ID list but alas, it never IDs him.

Please Let your friends know that roosters are birds too and deserve their recognition as the world's wake up call! Lol

I would like to see a version of the app that assigns names, as in 'Fred', 'Bertha', 'Kevin' to given birds, algorithmically. I get the same birds in my garden and I already know what species they are, but, I wouldn't mind knowing if my favourite birds have got new mates, or, if I am down the road, some way from home, to confirm that it is 'Kevin' that I see, as in the same 'Kevin' that frequents my bird bath.

Consistently assigning names to different blackbirds might be tricky, but, for other birds, I am sure that some AI algorithm could do this.

It is amazing, but it does often give false positives. That probably can't be avoided, though

I'd love an API of some sort. I have some birdwatching/tracking ideas that require I can id a bird by sound and Merlin would be the best route if they just let people us it ...

It does work pretty well. Great for non line-of-sight birding.

Pass them my thanks. I've been using the Sound ID on dog walks for a few years now and I love it. It's made me much more interested in the birds around me now, and if it tags a new bird that I've not come across before I'll often try to spot it. I think I'm a bird spotter now.

> Buttons don’t work often, screens are inconsistent, results get lost, and more issues.

What device are you using, out of curiosity? I use this app almost daily for months at a time across several generations of the Google Pixel, I haven't had any of these issues even one time. I'm not even sure what you mean by "we ID something, but it’s gone by the time we show it to someone". Like, it shows a match while you're recording, but the ID disappears after you've stopped the recording?

I've found the app starts hiccuping when I'm making a very long recording, but I've learned to just cut it off and start a new one after about 10 minutes.

> The sound ID works very well, especially in the jungles/forests of Colombia with zero network availability.

Interesting. I find that the sound ID works well if:

- I have my phone out of my pocket and exposed to the air (obviously, if the microphone is muffled, it may cause problems).

- I'm not moving (my footsteps seem to interfere no matter how loud the bird is)

- The Merlin App is running with "focus" (i.e., if Merlin sound ID is running in the background, it seems less likely to detect songs and calls). I don't know if this is really true or if I have a subconscious bias.

- There are also weird effects where it will sometimes fail to notice really loud obvious birds nearby (e.g., baltimore orioles directly above me) but it will nail a faint and distant song.

It would also be nice if it could show the part of the sonogram that forms the basis of its ID call. It is especially difficult for me to examine a sonogram when there are multiple birds singing at once.

> The rest of the app needs a lot of love, though. Buttons don’t work often, screens are inconsistent, results get lost, and more issues.

I have the opposite experience, but that may be a phone-specific issue??

Nevertheless, it's a fantastic app.

Love the app!

But it crashes for me every 255 seconds after start-up on Android. Yes, I timed it.

Is there a way to submit bug reports?

I tried adding a 2nd region when I was in Europe and it locked up. I had to reinstall the app to get it back to a usable state. Adding region packs is totally broken on iOS.

I have "butt Merlined" a few times...

Each time, I think to myself ... That bird is CLOSE! Let me take my phone out of my pocket and see if Merlin knows what it is ... DAMMNIT!

"Calling back" is a term I heard after getting into birding. I don't think they warn the user in the app enough about "Please don't use this to call to birds, only listen for your own reference".

If I were a bird, and another mysterious bird sound came that was speaking a certain feeling or phrase I could understand, and I come to see it's a giant monkey man playing the sounds from himself, I would probably move my family, too.

Yes, Cardinals are pretty territorial and chase each other out. Esp during nesting.

Whether it's whistling close to their tones, "Pishing" to get their attention, or playing sounds from phones, all of it interrupts their normal behavior. Cars, trucks, lawnmowers, motorcycles all mess with them too.

https://www.sibleyguides.com/2011/04/the-proper-use-of-playb...

>When song is played in a bird’s territory, that bird’s response to the “intruder” is watched attentively by neighboring males and by females. In one study (Mennill et al 2002) high-ranking male Black-capped Chickadees exposed to aggressive playback lost status as their mates and neighbors apparently perceived them as losers, unable to drive away the phantom intruder.

It's clear we're capable of mimicking their language with our devices and playing it back to them has potential consequences to breaking up a family of birds.

The spectrogram is actually also really handy for manual ID, and (at least for me) in remembering calls.

Neat.

When working in a linguistics lab as an undergraduate long ago, we looked at spectrograms to identify sounds (specifically places of articulation) as much as listened to recordings.

So it makes some sense to build a model on them rather than some other representation of the sound.

most audio NNs work on spectrograms

I'm the author of the Birder framework (a computer vision toolkit for bird classification) - https://gitlab.com/birder/birder It's still in early alpha, but you might find it useful for your DSLR workflow.

If you're interested in trying a web-based alternative, I have a demo space at https://huggingface.co/spaces/birder-project/birder-image-cl... where you can upload images directly from your browser. Fair warning though - it's primarily designed to showcase the models rather than provide any kind of user experience, so you'll need to manually select the appropriate regional model (look for suffixes like eu-common, arabian-peninsula, etc. based on where your photos were taken).

The coverage is still very limited... More regions will follow in the coming months.

I also use a dslr for my bird pics. When it comes time to id the bird I take a picture of my monitor and feed that to the app. The app doesn’t need my 48MP images to do the job. The screenshot is fine.

I do the same thing, but I only ID photos that I consider good enough to post, once posted they're accessible from my phone (Flickr, IG, et al) so it's no big deal to grab them and insert them into the app.

It definitely has trouble with similar species sometimes — I've noticed it recently with crows and warblers. But it does a great job generally and direct observation of the bird usually clears up the confusion.

I have a bunch of Blue Jays around my house and it turns out they are so good at imitating a specific hawk species(blanking on its name) that Merlin actually reports it as the hawk! I went and listened to real recordings of that hawks call and I couldn't tell it apart from the Jays imitation call.

Now, I know it's technically possible it was a real id, but Im pretty sure the bald eagle it detected was actually one of the kids down the street running around screaming lol

The only errors I've seen it make with common birds in the UK are also with finches - specifically with the greenfinch's "at rest" twitter, which it consistently mistakes for a goldfinch.

The two are visually distinctive but, in Merlin's defence, I can't tell them apart by ear either!

Oh, that's not my experience at all! I downloaded this app to see how many distinct songs a mockingbird was singing one time (it was a lot) and the app just came back: "Mockingbird". I was both amazed and disappointed!

Merlin also works offline. I use it all the time out in the mountains.

AFAIK WhoBird uses the same model (or at least, also developed by Cornell), but for me, Merlin is still better at identifying multiple birds at once.

whoBird is only working with audio (and not photos) though