#82: Merlin

The Merlin app

Poets often write about birdsong – Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush and Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale spring to mind. Both these poets knew how to identify the birds they heard. Hardy also sees his:

    An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

    Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

The nightingale is never seen in Keats’s poem, and indeed an obliteration of the senses is strangely part of what the poet desires to attain through the‘viewless wings of poetry’. He imagines the bird singing after his death:

    Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain –

To thy high requiem become a sod.

These are solemn interpretations to put on creatures marking their territory or trying to attract a mate. Birds also make shorter ‘calls’ to sound an alarm, identify other birds, connect with the flock or, in fledglings, beg for food.

The Merlin app

I’ve often wished I could identify birds through their song – I could tell chaffinches, and more characteristic callers like wood pigeons, the hoopoe or owl, but not much more. Now the Merlin app, devised by Cornell University, has changed this. Holding up your phone for a few seconds brings a picture of each bird singing. The bird’s name is highlighted as they sing to help you link the song and the bird (if there is more than one listed). I caught a lovely glimpse of a golden oriole flying from tree to tree in Spain after being alerted to its call, learnt the background tinfoil crinkle-song of serins and of course the everyday chatter of sparrows. The app also allows you to compare birdsong with a recorded sample to check its suggestions.

The more virtual, the more real?

But does this mean that, using the app, your ability to identify birds independently diminishes? I’ve found exactly the opposite – once given guidance, you listen hard and learn to identify them yourself.

This improvement in my ability is an example of one of sociologist Steve Woolgar’s ‘five rules of virtuality’ – ‘the more virtual, the more real ‘. In other words, virtual engagement increases actual engagement (although Woolgar was writing before AI). The example Woolgar gave was of televised football leading to more, not fewer, people attending football matches. Identifying the birds via the app means identifying them more in real life. If you haven’t already, try it.