I pointed my phone at a tree and it told me who was singing

I was sitting on a bench at a park near my apartment, eating a sandwich, when I heard a bird going off somewhere above me. Loud, complicated, the kind of song that sounds like it has verses. I looked up. Couldn't see it. I've lived in this neighborhood for three years and I've never known what any of the birds are. They're just birds. Small ones, big ones, the loud one that starts at 5am.

My brother, who got really into birding during the pandemic and never stopped, had been telling me to download Merlin for months. I finally did it sitting on that bench, mostly to shut him up.

I opened the app, tapped Sound ID, and held my phone up. Within about five seconds, a name appeared on the screen: Northern Mockingbird. Then another line popped up underneath: Carolina Wren. Then a third: Northern Cardinal. Three birds, singing at the same time, and the app was picking them apart in real time, showing me a little spectrogram with each bird's song highlighted in a different color.

I sat there for ten minutes holding my phone at a tree like an idiot. It was one of the best ten minutes I'd had in a while.

How it works

Merlin is made by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which is apparently the place where serious bird science happens. The app is free. Completely free, no ads, no subscription. You download a bird pack for your region and everything runs on your phone, even without cell service.

Sound ID is the main thing. You tap the microphone button, hold your phone up, and it listens. As birds sing around you, their names appear on screen in real time. Each one gets a colored bar on a spectrogram so you can see which sound belongs to which bird. You can tap any name to see a photo and hear sample recordings.

There's also a photo ID feature where you snap a picture and it tells you what you're looking at. I've used that a couple times, but Sound ID is the reason the app stays on my phone.

What changed

I go for walks now. Not in a lifestyle way. I just go outside more than I used to, because it turns out the world is a lot more interesting when you can hear a sound and know what made it. Last week I was walking to the grocery store and Merlin picked up a Red-tailed Hawk I never would have noticed. It was sitting on a lamppost across the street. I stood there looking at it for a full minute and a guy walking his dog asked me if I was okay.

I've learned maybe thirty birds by ear in about four months without trying. I just keep opening the app on walks and the names start to stick. The mockingbird does a different thing every few seconds. Cardinals sound like a laser gun. House finches do this long warbling run that goes up at the end, and for weeks I thought it was two different birds. I didn't sit down and memorize any of this. It just accumulated.

The part I didn't expect

It made me pay attention to sound. There are cedar waxwings in the parking lot at work. A pair of red-bellied woodpeckers live in the tree outside my window. A Cooper's hawk comes through my block every few days and all the smaller birds go quiet when it does. I'd been walking past all of this for years.

I don't own binoculars. I'm not going to. But my brother was right about the app, which I will never tell him.