To tell you about the Merlin app - Shazam for birds?

Downloading it now!!!

Does anyone know what a red dot beside a bird’s name is? In this case a Meadow Pipit.

still love this app. It’s like nice twitter with lots of very cute little tweets!

The orange and red dots mean it's an unexpected sighting ie either a rarely seen bird (Ooh!) OR a bird that 'isn't meant' to be there during that time of year... Something like that, anyway, we had a few dots on our list!

From the FAQs:

What do the red and orange dots next to some bird names mean?

These icons tell you if a species is rare (red dot) or uncommon (orange semi-circle) for the bird to be seen at the location and on the date that you selected. The same species that is common in summer might be rare in winter. Merlin knows which species are common or rare based on observations submitted to eBird, a citizen-science project that gathers observations from birders around the world.

Which is interesting as I had a nightingale show up the other day.

Ah thank you. Appreciate I should really have looked up myself but also wanted to share ! It’s the first time I’ve got a red dot!

I got a Meadow Pipet yesterday. In woods next to a reservoir in North Yorkshire.

I don't know if the birds here locally are just super polite but they seem to take it in turns to sing 😂 The app goes back and forth identifying their songs. Anyone else noticed that?

@BarbaraofSeville I’m in Herts so quite a bit further south. I wonder if it’s an error as I see they are usually found north and west.

@PoseyFlump mostly yes though I’d say there can be a bit of a sing-off between the robins, wrens and blackbirds round here!

I am totally thrilled with this ap.

Another bonus, for me, is that I can change the language setting & as I now live in France I can learn the bird names in French at the same time.

I had my first red dot yesterday when my app decided it had heard a Great Bittern. Now, we're nowhere near water, so it was very unlikely.

I've listened back to what it thinks is a bittern and compared it to the example sounds and I can tell that it has mistaken it for the plane going overhead to land at our nearby airport!

I have had a red dot twice- a redstart!

Me too. Apparently redstarts mimic lots of other birds, but whenever I’ve picked them up, DH says it was a chaffinch.

Yeah could.be, we have lots of those

I've never had a red dot, not even by mistake! FOMO 😂

I love this app. All twittering birds sound the same to me - I can just abut pick out blackbirds and sparrows by myself.

I've had a red dot twice - once when it decided the beginning of a thrush song was an oystercatcher, and once when my DS tricked it and it thought he was a curlew. It wasn't fooled by me pretending to be a pigeon.

The best thing was it picking up a Peregrine Falcon when I was on a walk. I was very excited. Couldn't see it though, unfortunately.

I've had a red dot for a Rose-ringed parakeet. I'm in the UK so not a native species. There's a colony of them near me

I’ve just downloaded this can’t wait to use it!

I've had a Lesser Goldfinch tonight. It doesn't come up with a proper picture for it and on Googling it's an American bird found in California and Texas - must have taken a wrong turn somewhere! A wrong "turn" 😆

What’s the bird that sounds like it’s shouting something about Shakespeare?

Get the app and find out 😃

same, i'm delighted by this news!

Wow!

Peregrines tend to roost in high buildings (churches/cathedrals/power stations) in towns and cities. Many have webcams to monitor progress (and an associated twitter feed).

In other news, my "I can do a car alarm" blackbird (and it is most definitely a blackbird, not a starling) appears to have been copied by another smaller bird (annoyingly I didn't have my phone to hand). My hunch is that it might be a goldfinch.

Beware that it's not fool proof. I belong to some FB bird groups and it really divides people there because it has given such weird IDs on occasion, but it's an app, it's from Cornell etc therefore people believe the results. If your nearest water is that far away, you are very, very unlikely to have a coot near you, particularly at this time of year when they're busy raising chicks. My husband and I were curious about it so we both downloaded it and sat side by side with the audio ID running. It didn't show the same birds for each of us (some were the same but not all) and failed to identify the very loud song thrush singing very close by. But, having said that, anything that gets people interested in the world around them has got to be a good thing. It's wrong to poopoo it just because it's "technology".

So far mine has been accurate. I've been able to find the birds after knowing what I was looking for. The only exception is a wren which I can hear but have never seen.