Migration is well underway. The second wave of songbirds arrives over the next few days, and they’ll be singing upon arrival. It’s about to get loud wherever you are.
You can use all this singing to figure out what birds are in your neighborhood. Many of the most common backyard birds don’t visit feeders, and don’t forage in plain sight. They lurk in the bushes and treetops. They might not be noticeable, except for the noise they’re making.
Use their noise to find and identify them.
Every year, I advise readers to learn the bird songs in their own backyards. Follow the songs around your home, until you find a bird that’s singing and identify it. Learn one bird song at a time. Then move on to other places you frequent, and learn those.
Never mind. Ignore my advice. Install Merlin.
Merlin is a bird-song recognition app, available as a free download from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It’s awesome. Whenever I visit some of America’s famous birding locations, I see people walking around with binoculars, but with their eyes locked on their smartphones, letting Merlin tell them what birds are within earshot. Its use has become universal.
There are downsides. Foremost, people are walking around looking at their phones, when they should be looking at the birds. Letting an app do all the identification work means never learning to identify birds without the app.
But for the next month, the forest will be so full of song, the cacophony will overwhelm anyone trying to learn birds by ear. I grant permission to use Merlin to sort them out.
Let’s take this convenient shortcut to discovering every bird in the neighborhood, while they are announcing who they are.
Keep in mind, Merlin makes mistakes. The app records the sounds it hears and compares them to an enormous library of songs, looking for the closest match. Sometimes, it goofs.
Of course, sometimes I goof. Other times, Merlin and I get into an argument, not sure which of us is guessing wrong. I used to win most of those arguments, but not anymore.
As more people use Merlin, more songs get added to its database, vastly improving its accuracy.
In fact, Merlin has gotten so good, it now teases me when I’m wrong. I’m trying out a beta version designed for experts, which taunts me with a string of insults whenever I misidentify a song. “I can’t believe you thought that was a Canada warbler, Bob. First day birding by ear?”
You can set your smartphone down in the backyard and walk away. Merlin will record every bird it hears, for as long as you can stand being away from your phone. The point is to inventory everything around your house, so you’ll know what to look for.
Most people are surprised to learn how many bird species call their neighborhood home.
Just remember, Merlin makes mistakes occasionally. When you retrieve your phone and it tells you it heard a flame-colored tanager, don’t believe it.
Don’t stop at just having Merlin identify everything. Try to find the bird, see for yourself, and get to know that species by sight and sound. It won’t be long before you can walk outside and know what you’re hearing, without using the smartphone.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology continues to revolutionize birding. I find I can’t live without eBird, the free mobile app for recording and sharing bird observations. Not only does it record and organize my sightings, I can also look up the sightings of others.
On this day one year ago, I was on my way to southeast Arizona in search of birds I’d never seen before. I planned much of the trip using eBird. One of the best ways to find a bird is to see where other people found it.
You can subscribe to free email alerts. Every day, eBird tells me what birds were seen in Maine yesterday that I have not yet seen in the state.
For instance, there is an eastern screech-owl that has been living in a particular tree in Portland all winter. I stopped on the way through town last week and got a great look. It became the 330th bird I’ve seen in Maine over my lifetime.
Don’t be impressed. The 330 species on my Maine lifelist puts me at only No. 69 among eBird users. Maine Audubon’s Doug Hitchcox holds the lead at 412 species.
Apparently, I need to get out more.