Avian app takes off among Eastern Washington birders

When he joined the Spokane Audubon Society in 2012, Gary Lee thought he would never be any good at identifying birds by ear.

“Early on, I was just so impressed with some of the folks I was birding with. They could tell what birds were calling in the trees and bushes, and I barely had a clue,” he said. “You feel a little bit guilty asking someone 12 times, ‘what was that one? What was that one?’ ”

When Lee installed the mobile app Merlin around four years ago, though, he suddenly had an entire lexicon of bird locations, descriptions and songs in his pocket.

Created, run and offered for free by Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, Merlin allows users to identify birds instantly through photographs, a step-by-step guide or audio recordings of birdsong.

“I just thought it was amazing,” Lee said. “I feel like, OK, even I can learn if I get 100 confirmations on the same bird. At some point I’m going to really know it. And so, it’s become my favorite birding app.”

The app has been downloaded 30 million times in the 11 years it has been around, with 14 million users active since the beginning of this year, said Merlin’s project coordinator Alli Smith.

“We’d like to say Merlin is for everybody, and that’s one of the best parts about it,” Smith said. “I feel like that’s a question everybody has at some point in their life. Maybe you’re woken up at 4 o’clock by some birds screaming outside your window. Maybe you don’t like the bird very much, but you’re curious, like, what is this thing that’s screaming out there?

“Or maybe you see a beautiful bird out at the beach somewhere. So just trying to make it as easy as possible for anybody to answer the question of ‘what bird is that?’ ”

Another local Audubon Society member, Shenandoah Marr, was initially dubious of the app.

“I kind of rejected it at first, because I thought it was crazy to be doing something to connect yourself with nature – like bird watching – while carrying a phone,” she said. “But once I started using it and I realized that it was just a great tool to help me learn to identify what I was looking at or what I was hoping to see, then I embraced it.”

Any active birder uses Merlin, the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count compiler Tim O’Brien said, calling it “basically an electric field guide.”

“Instead of carrying a book with all the different pictures – I’ll use red-tailed hawks because red-tailed hawks come in many different color forms and it’s all based on where they’re at in the country and also their age and there’s so many different color phases or forms of that species,” O’Brien said. “When you go on to Merlin, it gives you a picture of every possible color form so you can match it to what you’re seeing.”

All of the information on the app comes from Cornell’s other online platform, eBird, where birders can upload information and audio clips of birds that they have spotted. Jon Isacoff is the top by-species eBirder in Spokane, having logged sightings of 277 different species in the county and serving as the eBird reviewer for North Idaho.

Eastern Washington has a good mix of resident and migrant birds, Isacoff said, along with a high diversity of owls. Washington, he said, has the highest owl diversity in the United States. Boreal chickadees and spruce grouse are other “highly desired” sightings in the area.

Like Marr, Isacoff said that he was initially skeptical of Merlin, but has since “become a believer” over the past couple of years. Having bird-watched since childhood, Isacoff said that he doesn’t rely on the app for his identifications, but touts it as a learning aid for beginners – with the caveat of a less than perfect identification record.

“I’d say it’s pretty spot on on recognizing bird songs,” he said. “But it’s not quite as perfect when it comes to what we call ‘chip calls’ and ‘call notes,’ which are these short vocalizations that the birds make.”

O’Brien, while maintaining that Merlin is a great resource, also cautioned that the app is fallible. Christmas bird count records rely on expert birders’ judgments for accuracy.

“It does make mistakes, and that’s where it has to be up to the birder themselves to decide whether they actually did hear it or not,” he said. “When you’re doing the audio it sometimes picks up things that you know shouldn’t be around, and that – once again – is up to whoever is using it to decide if they’re going to use that as a tool as something they’re going to put on their species list or not.”

Smith said that the machine -learning model that analyzes sound for identification requires a minimum of 150 recordings per species. Many birds in North America and Europe have hit this threshold, but much of the rest of the world needs more data for the feature to work. The lab is working with conservation groups across the world to build a recording base.

There are 2.3 billion bird observations logged on eBird, Smith said, all of which are publicly available. The eBird website lets users play with the data, creating abundance, range and migration maps for species. Users can also monitor population declines and range shifts.

“If birds are in decline, that just generally means that their environment is in decline as well,” Smith said. “The environment doesn’t just affect birds, it affects humans too. So whether that’s pollution or habitat loss or climate change, birds are often the first thing that are affected that we can detect really well.”

Mike Borysewicz, an Audubon Society board member, remembers working for the Forest Service in the 1990s and seeing flocks of swallows at his station in Colville, some of which even nested in the building. Evening grosbeak were another highlight of his viewing, then. Today, Borysewicz said, those birds have “declined precipitously.”

A data collector for the U.S. Geological Survey’s breeding bird survey in the West Plains, Borysewicz said that while abundance has declined generally, insectivorous bird populations in the area have been hit particularly hard by pesticide overuse.

“We’ve poisoned a lot of insects out of existence,” he said, adding that climate change may be playing an increasing role in the loss of arthropods.

For birds and insects alike, Borysewicz said that most people aren’t aware of the degree of loss in biodiversity over the past few decades. He thinks to himself when with 20-year -old family members, “they’re not going to know what we knew in our 20s.”

“It feels like you’re losing friends almost,” Borysewicz said.

Bird populations are in steep decline everywhere. Smith said that Merlin is Cornell’s attempt to “get as many people around the world as possible to fall in love with birds.”

“We’ve got incredible scientists and ecologists that are working to understand why our birds are declining and how can we help them,” Smith said. “But we also need millions and millions of people around the world to care about birds enough that they’re willing to make changes in their lives to benefit birds.”

Marr, the conservation director for the local Audubon Society, said that loss of habitat to urban development, window collisions and domestic cats are some of the biggest threats to birds in Spokane.

“While we’re sensitive to housing issues and things like that, it’s important to consider habitat for birds and also insects when building,” she said. “For example, leaving some trees, leaving snags is really important for birds because a lot of them will nest in dead wood. And then they need insects to eat.”

Marr said that Audubon has been working with conservancy organizations to acquire land in the region to protect from development. It has also been developing a “window strike prevention” program to educate community members and apply bird-safety measures to buildings.

“If you care about public lands, if you care about our river, if you care about the mountains around here,” Marr said, “then you care about birds. That’s kind of how I see it.”