Bird App Wizardry: How Merlin helped us up our bird-spotting game

As we have long realised, St Olaves is an ideal location for some of the key target migratory bird species in west Devon: the Pied and Spotted Flycatchers, Willow and Wood Warblers and Redstarts. Nestled in the upper Teign valley and with acres of unfarmed wood pasture and boggy areas it should be an ideal location for these species, and also for some of our rarer, and/or rapidly declining, resident species such as Willow Tit, Meadow Pipit and Skylark. We have seen Redstarts off and on over the past six years, but the rest have pretty much eluded us but for a fleeting sighting of a Pied Flycatcher in the Covid lockdown spring of 2020. All that changed a fortnight ago thanks to a friend introducing us to a bird recognition app developed through crowd-sourcing co-ordinated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The app is called Merlin Bird ID and is free to download for most smartphone OS. You can download bird files for many parts of the world, but these are large, so we stuck with the one for the British Isles and northern Europe. We have made most use of its Sound ID capabilities, having heard that its AI is particularly effective at recognising bird songs and calls in the wild. It was an immediate revelation. Because the app lights up whenever a particular bird is calling, within a day or two we had both learnt or relearnt the calls of a whole host of birds, some of which, such as the Goldcrest, Siskin and Stock Dove, we realised were around us all the time. We also became more confident about identifying other species, finding it easier to pick out the sweet sound of the Blackcap against the backdrop of general birdsong. Its educational value alone is extraordinary.

But Merlin also quickly identified a group of birds that we had never recorded at St Olaves, including the tiny, orange-crowned Firecrest, Skylark, Meadow Pipit, Willow Warbler and Spotted Flycatcher. At first, we were sceptical. Was the AI playing tricks and misinterpreting more common bird calls? But then it flashed ‘Spotted Flycatcher’ just as we saw a small bird dart off a branch, loop in the air and return to the same spot. Bingo. In the week that followed we saw Spotted Flycatchers all around the viewpoint area, including one in a nest box (now confirmed as a lined nest). This morning, I watched two Flycatchers together on a branch close to the nest, until a third landed beside them only to be quickly chased away. Suddenly, we seem to have flycatchers everywhere (and a neighbour says they have also seen Pied Flycatchers nearer the river). Obviously, Merlin hasn’t brought the birds to St Olaves. We hope that that’s down to us trying to manage the land better for diversity, including creating more abundant insect life. But it did alert us to their presence and help us learn what birdwatchers call their ‘jizz’ (or giss): their distinctive movements, behaviour and overall appearance. Flycatchers, we now know, display a lot of jizz.

So give Merlin a try. It’s not perfect – Cornell Lab is clear that they still want to build their underlying crowd-sourced database (we’ve noticed that it’s particularly patchy for UK birds of prey—no Goshawk, Merlin, or eagles, only the common Buzzard etc.--it also wrongly thinks Tawny Owls are rare at St Olaves, when we see or hear them most days). But it will only get better, and it’s already an amazing free app that has transformed our appreciation of living in this beautiful spot.

St Olaves,

June 2023