Love this new Merlin bird sounds app

[Delphigirl]

From a recommendation on here I downloaded the Cornell university bird app called Merlin. If you press record somewhere birds are tweeting it tells you what bird you are listening to. It is totally compelling and I’ve only done it 3 or 4 times.
So far in my garden it has identified:
Blue tit
Coal tit
chaffinch
dunnock
blackcap
nuthatch
treecreeper
goldcrest
greater spotted woodpecker
wood pigeon
Collared dove
blackbird
thrush
robin
wren
Magpie
jay
jackdaw
crow
raven (that amazed me! High up in a pine, I couldn’t see him).

It does NOT identify chickens despite their best sqwawks. I need to get out there at night to identify my various noisy owls. It didn’t hear the kites circling above or the buzzard I saw high up, but the latter wasn’t crying much.

highly recommend!!!

I feel like it's a grown up game of Pokémon Go! Gotta catch 'em all!
Whipping my phone out at every opportunity.

It resolutely ignores my hens @juliehoney! And will not identify my red kites although they are always swooping over my garden making a racket

In fact I have just looked up “supported birds” on the sound ID section and red kite is not there at all! So that answers that mystery.

I think what puts me off is that it sounds very much like it's guessing tbh. Not accurate

I love this too! DH was moaning at me last time we went on a walk "You've been on your phone this whole time!" but I said it's no different to catching pokemon.

I get really excited when I get an uncommon one

The noisiest around here seem to be blackbirds. But I've also found a short-toed treecreeper, a great spotted woodpecker (we often hear them drumming which I love) and I think my rarest is a common firecrest.

Most apps guess. I like with this one that you can compare with their library calls so you can check if it's right or not before you mark it as confirmed.

Oh I got a common fire test this morning - is it rare? I saw that one.
my garden is surrounded on two sides by preserved woodland and it sounds like an aviary so I’m not surprised with the variety. I think it is pretty accurate, I’ve seen all the birds it has identified in my garden before apart from the fictional green heron and the raven. We get a lot of tree creepers and woodpeckers and I have a huge variety of tits and finches visiting my bird table in the winter.

Firecrest

For reasonably in-range birds singing or calling repeatedly, it’s very accurate.

It’s those sketchily heard or competing with other sounds that it really struggles with, and they are quite rare.

And you can listen to their bank of recordings and decide for yourself if it’s accurate.

It’s designed to help people identify birds by ear, and it certainly does that!!

@YewandOak - the collared dove call is three beats, the wood pigeon is five, which is how I remember to tell them apart.

The wood pigeon sounds like “I’m booooooooring, I know”

It didn't work for me at all

Did you download the Britain and Ireland database?

It’s been very accurate with all of the birds that it has identified that I could actually see and so confirm for myself. But I’m not entirely certain it got Firecrest correct for me, and I certainly couldn’t see it. It’s more likely to have been a Goldcrest (which I know we have here) that was maybe muffled or something. That’s why it’s important that users all feed back on its accuracy when they can.

In what way? Do you mean you could hear birds but it didn’t identify them? Or that it identifies them incorrectly?

The app just captured a jay and a mallard having a serious shouting match. I wonder if the mallard is nesting and the jay is eyeing up the eggs? Racket seemed to be Center Ed around a yes hedge …maybe Mrs mallard is in there.

yew hedge

I was most disappointed that it couldn’t identify the extremely loud peacocks at a place I went last weekend. I’m loving seeing what comes up in my garden though, mostly normal garden birds but it helps to know what to look for when I’m trying to spot them.

I turned it on while watching Spring Watch last night. I now have quite a collection of birds ;)

We have a lot of noisy birds at dusk here, so have just downloaded this. It will be interesting to know what they are. Yours all sound very exotic @Delphigirl

Not exotic - Oxfordshire!!!
2 new ones this lunchtime

carrion crow (3rd type of crow plus magpie and Raven - corvid central around here apparently)
bullfinch which is pretty

The wood pigeon sounds like “I’m booooooooring, I know”

Also: “my toes hurt, Betty”.

The jays in our woods were going crazy a couple of evenings ago. I thought a fox must be about or something.

Oh how fab this sounds. Especially for free! I'm off to download it!

I wish I had seen this before I went to see the Puffins

This is great. Seems pretty accurate as I see mainly robins blackbirds bluetits and magpies in my garden- it identified them all very quickly.

can't it identify Red Kites? it ' heard' at least 4 whistles just now they were right over my house, but didn't identify them. got a skylark this morning tho