Seduced By the Merlin App

If you happen to enter into conversation with a beginning birder, it’s rare that more than thirty seconds elapses before they mention the Merlin app, with a special glee. Learning the songs and calls of, say, two hundred birds, can take years, and perhaps decades. But all you need to do is hold up your phone with the Merlin app open and within seconds it will identify every bird that’s singing in the vicinity and provide a photo and a link to further information about that species.

For years I poo-pooed such an approach to birding. I neither needed nor desired an electronic device to mediate between me and the great outdoors. Such an arrangement undermined close communion with the landscape. And besides, I didn’t even own a cell phone until 2024.

I’d learned many bird songs over the years, one after the other, by seeing the bird sing it and somehow remembering the sounds and the patterns. The descriptions in the bird book were occasionally helpful, for example the “teacher, Teacher, TEACHER” of the ovenbird, the “witchity-witchity-witch” of the common yellowthroat, or the “drink your tea” of the Eastern Towhee. But I found that such verbal approximations only seemed to work in retrospect, helping to retain and internalize a pattern of sounds once you’d already heard the real thing and matched it to the bird that delivered it.

I devised unique descriptions for many of the songs I learned. For example, the spirited song of the ruby-crowned kinglet sounds to me like the creaky workings of an old hand pump, only three octaves higher. And the high-pitched song of the eastern wood peewee sounds to me like the lament of a jilted lover: first a plaintive three-note call, “Are you there?” followed by a long pause, then a dejected, off-key, two-note descent. Uhhh-uh.

I don’t know, but I wonder whether bird enthusiasts who merely hold their phones to the sky again and again actually absorb and retain the patterns they hear and succeed in associating them with the proper species.

But in recent times I’ve gained some insight into the usefulness and also the visceral appeal of the app. The first breakthrough came when I was hired to lead a small group of birders on a hike. I’d never met them before. They were beginners, full of enthusiasm. Two of them had the Merlin app.

We were walking through the woods out in Oakdale. It was a rainy morning, the leaves had filled out, and we weren’t having much luck. I heard a warbling vireo in a cottonwood tree fifty yards down the path. The song is common but difficult to describe—a rapid but wandering successions of fuzzy notes unlike that of any other bird. It seemed unlikely that we’d see it, but I drew everyone’s attention to the song, then asked one of birders to look it up on her app. She played the song, then showed the photo to everyone.

That was great. We never saw the bird itself, and if we had, it would likely have been a small white pellet the size of a cannellini bean scuttering through the upper story of the trees. But everyone had seen and appreciated its subtle beauty, and we knew it was up there somewhere.

A few weeks later, Hilary and I were in Old Frontenac, hiking the trail out to Sand Point, when we heard one of the strangest songs I’ve ever heard. One expert describes it as “a vigorous, wide-aware, intentional medley of odd noises that may continue for long periods of time…the alarm call of a wren; a series of nasal quacks; a wolf whistle; a foghorn; and a chuckling, high-pitched laugh.” He also mentions whistles, chortles, cat-calls, gurgles, and grunts. 

The song was loud; the bird was very close. We looked around for at least twenty minutes but saw nothing. No movement, no fleeting avian form. As we left, I said, “It’s probably some weird creature like a yellow-breasted chat.” I’d never seen one, or heard one. A shot in the dark.

A few hours later we were in Lanesboro, settling into a cozy upstairs room at the Cottage House Inn, when I suddenly heard it again! Impossible. “That’s it!” I all but shouted. “That’s what we heard!” Hilary had looked up the chat on her Merlin app and was playing the song.

When we got home a few days later, I submitted the "sighting" of the chat to eBird along with the narrative of how we'd figured it out, and they accepted the event as legitimate, based on our description of the song, though the bird is considered a rarity in these parts. 

This spring the app has become a useful tool for confirming a song we’re unsure about, and for identifying a song we’ve never heard before or don’t recognize. Just this morning we were up at Sherburne NWR walking a path through the tall grass when I heard a faint but piercing “chip.”

“I wonder if that was a Henslow’s sparrow?” I said. Wrong. Hilary pulled out her phone and turned on the app. Grasshopper sparrow! We heard the “chip” a few more times, then the bird burst out of the grasses and perched on the stalk of a leafless sapling twenty feet ahead of us, where we could see his characteristically flattened head.

Twenty minutes later we were chatting with another birder at the bend in the gravel road where we sometimes see an orchard oriole. He was just then looking at an orchard oriole, as chance would have it, and he showed us where it was. I told him we’d come upon a grasshopper sparrow, and he said, “Yeah, I got a good picture of him. He was sitting in plain sight on a leafless shrub."   

But it’s important to recognize that the Merlin app is sometimes wrong. This morning at Sherburne it mistook a catbird for a brown thrasher. And at the crack of dawn, as I stepped out onto the deck to rehang the hummingbird feeder (which we bring in every night because of the raccoons) the app informed me that a mockingbird was singing somewhere in the vicinity.

I don’t think so.

It occurred to me just now that all three of these birds are mimic thrushes, whose songs are full of complex, harsh, and seemingly random noises. Maybe someone at the Cornell Ornithological Lab is working on that glitch right now.