Binoculars for the Ears

I’ve been a supporter of Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology for a number of years, as well as their tracking tool eBird, and their online guide, All About Birds. EBird I’ve long used both as a tool for tracking my own birding activity but as a way to contribute data back into the larger community, and over the last year or so, I find myself reaching for my field guides and resource library less and less and going into All About Birds to study and research birds. When I was leading groups for Santa Clara County Audubon I always encouraged people to start using eBird because it’s an easy tool to use and simplifies the tracking aspect of birding.

The lab has had another tool to assist with IDing birds called Merlin, and one of newer features it added a few months back was the ability ID birds by sound.

Now, bird calls and I have a complicated relationship. I’m 80% deaf in one ear, and in the left ear, I’ve lost some hearing ability as well, much of the loss being in the vocal ranges; the left ear can’t be fixed by a hearing aid, and the right ear isn’t bad enough to warrant one yet, but it means I struggle to hear many birds out in the field. Going out birding with one of the mroe advanced birders was often an exercise in frustration since they were not only hearing species I couldn’t identify, but birds I simply didn’t hear, even with their help.

When you start birding, it’s typically just with your eyes, and as you get more interested in what the birds you see are, you add in a pair of binoculars, and then likely a field guide. Many birders are happy with this setup and may go years, or forever, with these tools. But many birders as they get more serious about birding they realize each species has a distinctive set of noises it makes, and if you study those, you can start recognizing which birds you’re hearing as well as seeing.

For me, putting time into studying calls has long been on the “someday” list, but it was hard to justify the time spent when I knew me ears would still limit how useful it would be to me. I’ve gotten reasonably good at recognizing a call I can’t identify, so I know there’s a bird around that isn’t familiar, but that’s been the limit to my work at becoming a better ear birder.

I’ve looked into rigs to capture sound on and off, and never pursued them because good ones could get expensive and it meant more gear to carry in the field, which is the last thing I wanted — and you still needed to listen to the recordings later and figure out what’s on them. A great project for the “someday” pile.

Which brings me back to the Merlin app. I’d known they’d added sound ID to it, but I hadn’t gotten around to looking into it yet, until the most recent episode of the ABA Bird Podcast, hosted by Nate Swick, came out. In it, he mentioned using it in his breeding bird survey ths year and talked about how easy and accurate it seemed to be (the big “challenge” for this kind of app: if you’re near mockingbirds, although the app does seem to show just how accurate their mimicry is!). This made me decide to just go play with it a bit out in the yard.

Recording audio couldn’t be easier: pull out your phone and push the button. All of the complexity of capturing audio is gone, with no extra gear (although do have a tiny shotgun mic with a lightning connector that plugs into my iPhone and just works). Merlin analyzes the incoming sound in real time and pops up a notice about any species it recognizes.

Merlin will keep a copy of your recordings, or allow you to export them (for further study or to attach to your eBird listing). It will also show you validated recordings for a species you can play back later (but please: be sensitive to recording playback in the field, where it’s discouraged or considered unethical in some situations because of the impact it can cause on the birds around you — never, for instance, start playing recordings around a known nest)

After a few days testing it out here on the property and one outing where I went chasing a Yellow-Breasted Chat (county first!) that left the day before I could chase it (of course), I am impressed with how easy it is to use, and I am loving how it is opening up new aspects of birding that my ears have held me back from. I’ve always known there are species out there I can’t see and my ears limit my ability to hear them.

Is this Cheating?

One of the questions I asked as I was trying to decide whether to include this data in my eBird listings is whether this is “cheating”. Is this giving me some kind of advantage I shouldn’t use?

After some thought, my answer to that question is no, it’s not. Any more, I think, than binoculars or a spotting scope is cheating at those times when birds are too far away to see well by the naked eye. We could have a discussion whether the automated ID aspect is cheating, but these days, it’s just almose easy to take a picture with your phone or a camera and feed it to Merlin to ID the photos; although the iPhone doesn’t have the long telephoto of my big birding rig, it’s still surprisingly easy to get a usable shot for ID much of the time.

I do think some judgements needs to be made, and so I’ve decided if a bird is “red dotted” for a location in eBird, which indicates it hasn’t been reported and is considered very unlikely, I’m not listing it without better data than a single hit in Merlin; at the least, I’m going to want to document it across a number of days, and hopefully be able to pull out and isolate the call from the recording for sharing and validation, before reporting that species.

So Merlin is now part of my standard kit for birding. What I’m currently doing when I’m out in the field is stopping every so often, firing up the app, and capturing audio for 3-4 minutes at a given location and see what pops up. Here at the house I’ve been enjoying going out on the deck for a while — sometimes 45 minutes on the weekends — and watching the birds come into the feeders and running Merlin along side me for 5ish minutes at a time for as many rounds as I have time to give it.

The results so far have been kind of amazing. My one field trip so far Merlin caught five species I never set eyes on, with that outing being 14 species overall.

Here at the house it’s been even crazier in good ways. Where a typical day long feederwatch out my office window, or wandering the property a bit to see what I can find,. would normally nab me a rather nice 15 species, give or take a couple, this morning I spent 45 minutes out on the deck (9:00 to 9:45) and with Merlin’s help, nabbed 23 species. In the last week, Merlin has helped me add 18 species to my year list, 12 of those new to my yard list. The count for species found on this property now sits at 62, one short of the number of species I saw in my entire time (15+ years of birding) at the house in Santa Clara, and we’ve only been here a year.

There have been some fun and interesting additions — most of ones I would have expected to be here, but because they don’t visit the feeder and instead glean insects among the trees, take some work and luck to see visually: Pacific-Slope Flycatcher, Brown Creeper, and Western Wood Peewee, for instance. We’ve had some luck with warblers, which have been quite rare on the property, including Orange Crowned, Wilson’s (which I got lucky and did see once), and Common Yellowthroat.

The latter was a bit of a surprise, but in retrospect not, because there are wetlands and some small stream/pond/marshy areas in the woods around us. That’s also likely the source of the biggest surprise, Green Heron, which Merlin picked up twice in one session. It’s the one “red dot” bird it’s found on the property so far, and while it’s a bird you can find here in the county, I have to do some exploring to identify the habitat out in the woods it might be using, or get it to show up in Merlin multiple days before I’m comfortable listing it. I expect I’ll capture it at some point, but two calls in the same minute that hasn’t been repeated isn’t good enough for me yet.

If there’s another bird that cropped up in Merlin that surprised me, it’s Mountain Quail, but we are at some altitude (about 500 feet up) here, and I do feel this isn’t a weird place to find them. An interesting aspect of this is that my house is in a big empty spot for eBird, with the nearest defined hotspots a few miles away and in different habitat, so I am somewhat literally filling in a void in the data map here, and there aren’t other birders nearby I can corroborate with based on their nearby lists: there are none. I find this to be an interesting challenge and one I am trying to use to remind myself to be thoughtful about how I submit data.

It’s also a Training Tool

Merlin is also a very useful tool for coaching yourself to improve your ear birding. By studying what sounds are out there, and watching as Merlin flags birds it’s hearing, I am finding it helpful to start locking in specific calls to specific species in my head. It didn’t take long for me to start recognizing Golden-Crowned Kinglet out in the woods, but I swear, I could have a Pacific-Slope flycatcher sitting on my shoulder and I wouldn’t hear the thing. Stupid ears.

Part of my goal here is to use Merlin to better understand what the bird diversity is in my home location and in the places I visit, but another aspect of it is to use it to help me improve my own ears and recognition without its assist. By spending some time studying what’s around you and using Merlin as an assist to start pulling calls out of the general noise of a location, you can start teaching yourself to ear bird your local species without that assist. I’ve you’ve been curious about ear birding but found the time and study intimidating, Merlin is a great tool to help you get started or move your ear birding forward at whatever pace you’re comfortable with.

It Could Be Even Better

I think the Labs folks who designed and built this app pretty much nailed it. There’s very little to complain about and few additions I could suggest.

With one exception: I’d really like it if there was a way for Merlin to pull apart a given recording and break it up into pieces based on the species that are calling. That, with a nice export function, would make it a lot easier to attach those calls into eBird reports, and to, say, know where in a five minute audio recording that green heron called, so I can focus on listening to just that call to try to better validate the find. Those are things I can do on my own (I know enough Logic Pro to be dangerous, but even Garageband would do) but it seems like a “fairly” easy thing to implement given what they’re already doing. At the least, maybe create a list of timestamps, so I could export an audio file and be able to know exactly where inside it to listen for further study…

But other than that? I’m mostly annoyed I didn’t start using this earlier, because it solves a problem in my birding I knew I had but wasn’t willing to go through the hassles needed to set myself up to work around them — now, all I need is my phone.

And that’s awesome.