When Natasha Walter first became curious about the birds around her, she recorded their songs on her phone and arduously tried to match each song with online recordings. After a friend recommended Merlin Bird ID, a free app, she tried it in her London garden and was delighted to discover the birds she assumed were female blackbirds \u2013 \u201cthis is how bad a birder I was\u201d \u2013 were actually song thrushes and mistle thrushes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m obsessed with Merlin \u2013 it\u2019s wonderful and it\u2019s been a joy to me,\u201d says Walter, a writer and human rights activist. \u201cThis is what AI and machine-learning have been invented for. It\u2019s the one good thing!\u201d<\/p>\n
Screenshots of the Merlin app in action. Composite: cornell.edu<\/p>\n
Merlin is having a moment. The app, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology<\/a> in New York, which listens for birdsong and identifies the species singing, has been downloaded 33m times, in 240 countries and territories around the world. Britain has the second highest total number of users \u2013 more than 1.5 million in 2024, an 88% increase from 2023. Every month, there has been a 30% increase in new users of the app, whose sound identification function was launched in 2021.<\/p>\n Merlin has been trained to identify the songs of more than 1,300 species around the world, with more birds added twice a year. Different songs make distinct patterns on spectrograms and Merlin is trained to recognise these different shapes and attribute them to a species.<\/p>\n For latecomers to birding, or those lacking a knowledgeable friend, the app has become their teacher. \u201cMy fear at first was I wouldn\u2019t actually learn because I\u2019m outsourcing my understanding of birds to this app,\u201d says Walter. \u201cBut that hasn\u2019t come to pass. It\u2019s helped me continue my journey of learning.\u201d Nowadays, she guesses, and uses Merlin to confirm her hunches. \u201cIt\u2019s wonderful if you\u2019re coming to bird-watching late and don\u2019t really have a mentor,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Angela Townsend from Bedfordshire began using Merlin after going on a nightingale walk one spring and being overwhelmed by the range of bird-voices in the evening chorus. She has found it has steadily built up her bird knowledge. \u201cWarblers were just little brown jobbies but I can now recognise Cetti\u2019s warblers and willow warblers when I\u2019m out without having to put the app on,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Mary Novakovich, author of My Family and Other Enemies, is another recent adopter. She has found it particularly useful when travelling across Croatia, where her parents are from. \u201cI love putting a name to a face and a name to the sound,\u201d she says. \u201cIt really brings you closer to the natural world, rather than it being disconnected from your life. It\u2019s part of what makes life a joy.\u201d<\/p>\n Merlin is not flawless, however. The first time Kasper Wall, 12, tried it in his Norfolk garden, it detected a northern cardinal and a brown-headed cowbird \u2013 North American species not found in Britain.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it was figuring out where we live,\u201d says Wall, who enjoys using it even though he is now an extremely knowledgeable birder. \u201cA couple of weeks ago we were looking at a large group of goldcrest and it came up with a firecrest. I thought, \u2018Oh, there must be a firecrest in here too\u2019 and 30 seconds later we saw one, which was the first I\u2019d ever seen. I like it and it\u2019s very good but I wouldn\u2019t say that it\u2019s better than the best people at identifying bird-calls like [the naturalist] Nick Acheson. It can definitely be fooled.\u201d<\/p>\n Wall enjoys fooling Merlin with his uncanny impressions of a curlew, barn owl and greenshank.<\/p>\n Acheson doesn\u2019t use Merlin. He welcomes it, but points out it can replace learning. \u201cAnything that gets people out, thinking about and reacting to nature is a great thing,\u201d he says. \u201cBut there\u2019s certainly a risk that people don\u2019t learn and just abdicate responsibility for learning to Merlin.\u201d<\/p>\n He has noticed a glitch where Merlin interprets a certain type of chaffinch call as a redstart, leading to people being absolutely adamant that there is a rare bird in their garden. \u201cThere\u2019s no substitute for a real person explaining to you how a birdsong feels and encouraging someone to engage with it emotionally,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n John Williamson, who works as a guide for Norfolk Wildlife Trust<\/a>, has found Merlin repeatedly identifying high-pitched calls as a spotted flycatcher, a bird that is very unlikely to be found in the middle of Hickling Broad nature reserve\u2019s<\/a> large reedbeds. \u201cMerlin can\u2019t do habitat,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Merlin has also excited visitors by identifying a golden oriole, a very occasional rare migrant, in Hickling woods, but no one has actually seen the species. Williamson is convinced it is misinterpreting a fairly unusual \u201ccatcall\u201d of a female jay, a common woodland bird.<\/p>\n That said, Williamson finds it a \u201cgood tool\u201d and welcomes how it is encouraging new people to enjoy birdsong, and particularly its mental health benefits. He knows one person who suffers from acute anxiety but Merlin has got him out into the world again and into nature, providing a focus for calming trips outdoors. \u201cI find it impressive that an app can empower people to go out into nature,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Research has found that birdsong is particularly beneficial to mental health, and has a lasting positive impact on wellbeing. For millions around the globe, that\u2019s exactly what Merlin is doing.<\/p>\n \u201cIt reminds you that there are birds knitted into your daily life,\u201d says Walter. \u201cIt\u2019s not about, \u2018now I\u2019m going to do a bit of birdwatching\u2019, you may simply be walking through the park and you hear something and it gives you a sense that these birds are singing away all the time, even in London.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Natasha Walter first became curious about the birds around her, she recorded their songs on her phone…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":658514,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[748,393,4884,12,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-658513","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-northern-ireland","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115793705384569354","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/658514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}