“Birding by sound opens up a whole new world. Other bird-identifying apps include the Audubon Bird Guide, ChirpOMatic, Picture Bird and Smart Bird. More than 7 million people now use the app worldwide, and “we’ve more than doubled the number of users in the last year,” said Alli Smith, a project coordinator for Merlin. But then Sound ID was released in June 2021, and the number of users skyrocketed. The number of users grew 67 percent by the first spring of the pandemic compared to a year earlier, Cornell said. BIRDING BY EARīirding’s popularity soared during the pandemic, when people were eager to get outside and the outdoors became, briefly, a quieter place in which to hear birdsong and other sounds of nature.įirst released in 2014, Merlin rode that wave of interest. It has turned a neophyte like me into an obsessive about birds and the world they’ve opened in my life. Who knew all these birds could be in one yard?Īs the annual fall migration begins across the Northern Hemisphere, apps like Merlin, which is put out by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, have caught on among birders and non-birders alike by revealing just how crowded with species our surroundings are. Then a great horned owl appeared on my screen, again with a red dot. One bird had a red dot next to its name it was a veery, a warm-colored thrush, and the dot meant it was a rare sighting. Chimney swift, northern flicker, fish crow, killdeer, Baltimore oriole and gray catbird among them. Then other birds, like the northern cardinal and the goldfinch.Īs the minutes passed, more birds joined the list. At first, the usual suspects for my neighborhood outside of Boston popped up: robins and blue jays, ubiquitous throughout the Eastern U.S. I ran Merlin’s “Sound ID” feature for half an hour. Where before I had simply heard birdsong, I now realized how rich the variety was in that single moment. Thanks to the app I’d just downloaded on my phone - the popular and free Merlin Bird ID - I learned just from listening that I was surrounded by more than a dozen species of birds. I was sitting in solitude earlier this summer in an Adirondack chair in my backyard, when I realized I wasn’t as alone as I’d thought. Business & Finance Click to expand menu.
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