Depending on Myself

It is an unfortunate fact, one I hate acknowledging, that I will no longer see 20 again. Or 30. Or even 50. 

What led me to this reluctant acknowledgement is feeling the pains in my neck and legs after taking long, slow walks outside to find the birds in my area on their way to northern breeding grounds.

Today's Merlin home screen
(RE Berg-Andersson)

Yes, it is spring migration season and every day there are different birds now coming to my feeders that weren't around over the winter - purple finches, chipping sparrows, even white-throated sparrows that may have been intimidated during the winter by all the juncos. Meanwhile, the number of juncos is down as they head north to breed.

My husband (MH) is slowing down and there are many days I can't get him to come birding with me. He is a late riser and his knees are balky. When he does consent to accompany me, he tends to lag behind and depend on me to point birds out rather than using his eyes and ears to help me find them.  

So now that I have the time to do this, most mornings I go birding alone. Until recently, though, I had some help.

I wrote last year about using the free Merlin app created by the birding people at Cornell. Along with my eyes and legs, my hearing has been declining after decades of blaring music through headphones to dull out the noise from commuter trains. The app hears things I don't always hear right away. It gives me something to look for. Yes, it gets things wrong, such as identifying the calling Canada geese overhead as the smaller, darker brant geese. It makes "suggestions" after all.

This is as much technology as I care to use when I go birding. I found Merlin to be a helpful backup -- until it stopped working.

A sighting of that rare bird, MH. (Margo D. Beller)

A couple of weeks ago MH and I went birding, I heard something, I put on Merlin. It shut off. I tried again. It shut off again. MH opened the app on his phone. It crashed. I tried opening it on my phone once we got home. It crashed again.

MH and I uninstalled the app from our respective phones. I looked on some online forums and found others were having the same problem. Had Cornell made some change so it wouldn't work with my phone? I wrote Cornell and never got an answer.

Some people suggested clearing the cache on my phone. Didn't work. I loaded Merlin on my tablet, even adding packages of bird data from way outside my area. It worked on the tablet. I uninstalled Merlin from my phone again and reinstalled it. Same problem.

MH, meanwhile, decided it wasn't worth his trying because he always birds with me and I am the more active searcher. So Merlin is off his phone.

For a couple of weeks I was back to birding the way I once did - depending on my eyes and ears, with maybe some help from MH if he deigned to go out with me. I was still finding things but the searching up and down did a number on my neck, a phenomenon birders call "warbler neck" because these little birds are always moving around high in trees starting to leaf out. 

(RE Berg-Andersson)

Without Merlin I was no longer taking off my gloves so I could carefully pull my phone out of my jacket pocket so as not to lose the list of what Merlin had picked up. I was no longer walking with a phone in my hand, looking at it every few minutes. I began to think I would only use Merlin on the tablet in places where I would really need help, such as during our annual trip to Old Mine Road where the cacophony of calls makes it hard to identify the individual breeding birds. 

Periodically I would try Merlin on my phone. Sometimes it would have trouble finding my location and then crash. Sometimes it wouldn't even get that far. 

I was resigned to depending on myself - bad eyes, ears and legs - to find birds, bothered by thoughts of what I could be missing because the calls were too faint or high in pitch for me to hear. 

This story has a quasi-happy ending. Merlin still does not work consistently. In fact, it has been about as easy to get Merlin to accompany me as MH. I've gotten Merlin to work on my phone after multiple crashes by turning the app on, leaving it alone long enough to load all the things it needs to work and then hitting the record button as a bird sings overhead. But this does not always work. I now have to be patient to use this app, and patience is not one of my usual traits.

So when it comes to technology I've been reminded it is better for me to trust the computer in my brain, enjoy what birds I can find on my own and not fuss about what I can't. 

Birding With Merlin

It's always nice when I can go birding with my husband (MH) or with friends. The more eyes and ears to find and identify the birds, the better.

But what if the friend coming along isn't human?

Merlin home screen (Margo D. Beller)

So it was that MH and I recently traveled with the free Merlin app, provided by the birding experts at Cornell University's Ornithology Lab.

Merlin is the name of a falcon, halfway in size between the small American kestrel and the larger peregrine falcon. It is also one of the names, depending on whose legend you're reading, given to the wizard who tutored the boy who became King Arthur. To many birders, Merlin is a rather magical tool.

For me, not so much. 

I had resisted downloading this app ever since it was introduced in 2014. For decades I have gone out into the field with my binoculars, looked at a bird and then identified it after pouring over my many reference books. Or, more often, I listen to a call, try to find the bird, make a note of the pattern and then use one of my CDs of bird songs to identify it.

In the two decades or so I've been indulging in this lunacy I think I've done pretty well. Certainly my friends seem to think I'm an expert.

However, when MH and I did our annual spring day trip to Old Mine Road, a road in the northwestern corner of New Jersey that runs from Worthington State Forest into the federal Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, I found myself more overwhelmed than usual by the sheer number of breeding birds that come here in May and sing their territorial songs while setting up housekeeping. 

This has been especially true with warblers. There are many whose call I've heard very often so the bird is easy to identify: the "sweet-sweet-I'm-so-sweet" of the yellow, the "teaCHUR, teaCHUR" of the ovenbird, the "witchety-witchety" of the common yellow-throat. 

Merlin list of birds it heard (Margo D. Beller)

However, there are 35 types of warblers that pass through New Jersey each Spring and Fall, and many I rarely see, much less hear, so I am not as good identifying them. The magnolia, the Cape May or the bay-breasted warblers, for instance, have high, thin calls that are very tough for me to hear.

So after reading enough reports of birds that I could've identified had I heard them or knew what they were, I downloaded the app to help me. The first time I used it, at one of my favorite birding places, the Great Swamp, MH was so impressed he downloaded it, too.

Merlin has two identification features: a microphone for recording songs and a camera for taking a picture of a bird. I have not used the camera. As for the microphone, the app plainly states the microphone is most effective if you are standing in a quiet area near the bird you are trying to identify.

This is not what I have been doing.

Much of the time I've used it the phone was in a pocket as I walked. When I'd stop to check the phone Merlin would either show me a list of birds it "heard" or I'd find the app had closed because something rubbed against the touchscreen the wrong way. It is extremely difficult for me to hold the phone in one hand, a walking stick in the other and then want to quickly use the binoculars to see something moving. Especially on a rocky hillside. Going down.

If I hear something unusual, however, I stop (in a safe place), hold the phone and see what pops up. After using this app 10 or so times in very different birding locations, here is what I've learned:

There are times I can hear and identify a bird before Merlin. 

There are times Merlin hears a bird call I don't hear (which prompts me to try listening really, really hard. Half the time I still don't hear it).

There are times Merlin hears a bird call I don't hear until later in my walk and at another location. 

There are times Merlin makes a mistake, such as the catbird it identified as a red-eyed vireo and the yodeling female wood duck (which I later saw) identified as a killdeer.

There are times Merlin does not hear at all the sound I'm hearing.

Birders I've consulted on Facebook have been unanimous in saying Merlin is a less-than-perfect tool, and they never, EVER, report the birds the app "hears" and they don't. Rely on your experience, is their thinking. I agree. 

Merlin has its uses, just as the cellphone has its uses. The trick is knowing when to shut them off and go on with your life (or your birding).