View From The Shed by Volunteer Shaun - MERLIN THE MAGICIAN

MERLIN THE MAGICIAN

Since the birth of the internet I’ve dreamed of owning a pair of binoculars with built-in online access. My perfect but imaginary pair would allow me to look at a magnified image of a bird, take a photo of it then link to the ‘net and find out what said bird is. The stuff of science fiction, or so I thought. Now it seems that my dream is close to coming true.

For less than £100 you can now buy a pair of bino’s that will allow you to take a reasonable quality snapshot of whatever’s in the line of vision or via a tiny pop-up screen. True, your pictures won’t be of hi-def, competition quality but they’re good enough to be of use for bird ID purposes. Search for ‘digital binoculars camera’ - there are quite a few brands (all unknown to me) selling them. 

As for the built-in identification process, that too is now available but it comes with a hefty price tag. The Swarovski Optik AX Visio is the most hi-tech pair of binoculars I’ve ever seen. You just look at your bird, press a button and it will display the bird ID overlaid on your field of vision. I’d love a pair but at £3,820, I’m really a little bit too attached to my arms and legs. 

They’re probably beyond the reach of most birdwatchers but there is another piece of technology that’s recently become available that you really should consider adding to your natural science armoury. Not least of all because it’s free.

I am sure that our friendly retail staff and volunteers can navigate you around your optics requirements - or check them out at the next optics event weekend of 29th 30th June. optics event

Some birdwatchers choose to only record sightings that they have discovered, spotted and identified for themselves in the field. To take advice from others, they feel, (be it in the form of humans pointing something out to them, guidebooks in the field or any other technology) is in some way ‘cheating’. They like to keep their birding as ‘pure’ as possible. While I respect this point of view, I disagree. I’ll take any help offered if it means I can get a greater chance of a correct positive bird identification. So when someone told me about a mobile phone app that can make a reasonable stab at identifying a bird just from a few seconds of its call or song, I nearly broke my finger stabbing the “download” button.

Merlin is incredibly easy to use. You simply open up the app and hit the big “Sound ID” button. Then a scrolling sound wave will appear. Whenever the software recognises the call or sound of a particular bird it displays it, gradually building a list of all the birds that it believes it has heard for as long as you leave it running. That’s it. It does one job and it does it surprisingly well.

It’s not perfect. Like any guide, be it technological, paper based or indeed human, it’s been known to make mistakes. For example it seems to have an aural blind spot when it comes to Redstart, often mistaking the common Chaffinch for this much rarer migrant. It also has trouble deciding between the Yellow-Legged Gull and the Lesser Black-Backed Gull too but then again don’t we all? Big gulls are notoriously difficult to tell apart, as I may have mentioned in these blogs more than once.

The thing is that you shouldn’t just point it at the sky for half an hour and then say, “I’ve spotted 27 birds today”. Merlin claims to have recognised them, not you. Each to their own, but for me it is an identification aid. If it comes up with a bird that I haven’t seen before or am unaware is in the area where I find myself, then I’ll start scanning the skies and surrounding greenery for the source of the sound. Imagine if a friend said, “I think I might have just heard a Laughing Kookaburra”. You wouldn’t instantly mark it as a definite sighting for yourself, would you?

This is exactly what happened to me while walking around an unfamiliar reservoir last week, although the friend in question was the Merlin app and the bird it claimed to recognise was nowhere near as exotic. I had the app running on my phone when I heard an unfamiliar birdsong. It was a bit like a Blackcap but I wasn’t certain. I looked around and saw a bird in a nearby tree, singing its heart out. The song was the most significant thing about it as visually it was the epitome of the ‘Little Brown Job’. There were absolutely no distinguishing features about it whatsoever. And that was what swung it for me. LBJ? Check. Song like a Blackcap? Check. Nothing to note about its appearance? Check, check and triple check. It was a Garden Warbler and it sounded beautiful. I pulled my phone out and consulted Merlin, who agreed with me. It even showed a helpful catalogue image of the bird too.

To me that’s how I mainly use the app, as confirmation and helpful hint. It’s a clue as to what’s around, but you shouldn’t rely on it exclusively. I’ve yet to use it abroad where I have a much lesser knowledge of birds and their sounds. I guess I’ll have to depend on it more and use it as part of further research as to what species I actually see.

It's also a boon to those of us with a degree of hearing loss. As I’m starting to lose the ability to pick up the higher pitched birds, it’s great to know that they’re still singing, screaming or squawking, even if I can’t hear them quite as well as I used to.

Merlin has one final neat trick up its wizard’s sleeve. It can be linked to those staggeringly expensive binoculars that I wrote about earlier, therefore improving their already impressive hit-rate. I really, really want a pair of them now.

On a completely unrelated note, I have a birthday coming up….