My favorite bird recordings

Sifting through Merlin memories.

Welcome to Owl My Children, a monthly newsletter where I recount some exciting bird moments from the past month several years, as captured in incidental audio recordings.

Life has been busy lately. Work has mostly confined me to my desk, and I’ve spent my evenings watching Duke in the NCAA tournament and failing miserably in my family’s bracket pool despite always picking Duke to win. I also recently had to update my iPhone software. Normally this wouldn’t be big news, but in order to accommodate the update, my phone told me I had to delete some stuff. And of all the apps taking up storage space, guess which one was the worst offender?

Merlin Bird ID.

I had been dreading and expecting this moment for a long time. I have used Merlin Bird ID since 2019, but for those first few years, it was a nice little app that hardly took up any room on my phone. And then Merlin’s Sound ID feature came out in the summer of 2021. At that time, it wasn’t amazing, but it picked up a lot of stuff I had never noticed before. I’d use it occasionally but didn’t start relying on it until Spring Migration of 2022.

The dark ages

Prior to Merlin Sound ID, I would try to just remember birdsong I heard while out in the field. I’d repeat notes to myself while I was walking. Then I’d come home and Google different birds and their applicable sounds until I thought I heard one that sounded similar to what I remembered. It’s a truly horrible way to learn sounds, but I was a music minor in college and had done a lot of ear training, so I told myself I’d pick it up eventually.

If you’re wondering why I never tried recording the birds: I had tried to use the Voice Memos app on my phone, but the app wasn’t able to “hone in” on faraway birdsong, and a lot of my recordings just ended up sounding silent. So I had to resort to recording myself doing the song, like this:

Please note, my minor was in piano, not in singing.

This recording is from early 2020, when I was only just beginning to dabble in the art of birding by ear. I believe I might have been imitating a song sparrow? But we’ll never know for sure.

Here’s Michael, who has always supported me in my birding journey, and who started recording himself doing unknown birdsongs as well:

I have no idea what bird he was imitating. Maybe an oriole? If you have any guesses, please let me know in the comments.

You can see why Merlin Sound ID was a real game changer. Even though it wasn’t great at parsing lots of different bird calls at once, I liked having it open just in case it picked up a call that I hadn’t noticed myself. Over time, its ability to ID lots of different sounds improved, and I started using it as a tool to quiz myself on birdsongs while I was out birding. I’m not proud of it, but I also regularly attended a weekly bird walk were I often found myself arguing with a particular older gentleman—let’s call him Bernard—who thought he knew everything, and I liked to use Merlin to contradict his faulty bird IDs. He once told the group that there was no way to tell the difference between the songs of a yellow-billed cuckoo and a black-billed cuckoo. Not so, Bernard! And look, Merlin can prove it!

(I don’t encourage you to use Merlin for such purposes, but if you have found yourself on a walk with a Bernard, you gotta do what you gotta do.)

Recording-hoarding

Anyway, back in the years 2022 through 2023, I saved every single Merlin recording I ever made. I swear the “cancel” feature did not exist back then! (Currently, when you’re recording birds on Merlin Sound ID, there’s a big red button in the middle that lets you stop—and automatically save—your recording. There’s also an option on the left to “cancel” the recording, which does not save it to your phone.)

Since learning about the cancel feature in the fall of 2023, I hardly ever save recordings, but I still have over 500 recordings from previous years that have been weighing quite heavily on my mind and on my phone storage.

At the beginning of March, I started going through my recordings. This feels like an impossible task because many of the recordings are over three minutes long. I had thought that I’d simply be able to go through and delete them if there wasn’t a “special” bird on the recording, but then I started listening, and I got hooked.

I realized, with each passing recording, that I hadn’t just captured the particular birds I heard that day. I captured a sense of place—the bugs and the frogs, the cars passing by, the particular feeling of the marsh where I used to watch a bald eagle family every week, the sound of the woods from the back porch at my in-laws’ house.

For example, below is a recording from May 2022 at my in-laws’ house in Durham, where I must have been sitting on the back porch beneath the pines, bleeding. (At the beginning of the recording, Michael says he’s going inside to get me some Neosporin and a book). I have no memory of this event. Still, for the next two minutes (I cut it down to 30 seconds for your benefit), I recorded many of the birds I’ve come to associate with this particular place: tufted titmice, Carolina wrens, pine warblers, northern cardinals, and nuthatches (both white-breasted and brown-headed. You can hear a brown-headed nuthatch’s squeaky-toy sound 27 seconds into the recording.).

I love how these Merlin recordings immediately transport me to this well-loved place, even though I don’t remember the day itself.

One of the things that I find so fascinating about my Merlin recordings is that they are not imprinted into my memory in the way that photos so often are. When I look at a bird photo I’ve taken, I can tell you the exact place I stood when I took the photo, the people I was with, the other birds we saw that day. I researched this phenomenon and learned that, while casual photo-taking throughout the day can actually lead to decreased memory of specific events, purposeful photo-taking—where the photographer really pays attention to their surroundings and focuses on visual details before taking the photo—can improve the photographer’s memory of the event.¹ Taking photos can also redirect your attention to your visual surroundings while distracting you from your auditory surroundings, which might explain why I have very little memory of so many of my audio clips.²

The recordings I love the most are the ones where someone talks unexpectedly, the birder-to-birder conversations, the gasps of excitement upon seeing a lifer.³ It’s kind of fun (and terribly cringey) to hear myself in these recordings, like I’ve opened up a portal to my younger and more excitable self. With my current job and lack of easy access to so many diverse habitats and parks, birding hasn’t come as easily to me in Pittsburgh as it did in Madison. I miss these days and that younger self!

Here are some of my favorites:

1. Sedge Wren

It’s hardly audible in this recording, but while my friend Ben and I were walking past a parcel of meadow in Madison known for its sedge wrens, I heard a metallic sound and paused to record it. Neither of us had seen a sedge wren during that calendar year (2022), so it was a First of Year for both of us! (Also, shoutout to Ben for still being my friend even though I celebrated the sedge wren in this particular manner. I do not remember doing this.)

Also very audible in this recording are the many common yellowthroats that live in Madison, which in my experience are much harder to come by in Pittsburgh.

2. Rock Wren

Yes, another wren recording. Wrens are the best.

In February 2024, when on a trip to Death Valley with my friends, we got out of our car at the “Welcome to Death Valley” kiosk thing so I could take a picture (it was my first time visiting a National Park). I heard a bird singing and had absolutely no clue what it was, but I whipped out my camera and Merlin simultaneously. Merlin ID’d the bird before I did.

This is the very same rock wren we hear singing in the recording. I managed to juggle both my Merlin app and my camera to take this photo.

3. Red-headed Woodpeckers

In this recording, my mom and I are at a local reservoir known for its nesting red-headed woodpeckers. This clip is representative of many of the recordings I uncovered in my Merlin library, which involve people (me or others) trying to explain to other people exactly where a bird is.

Hearing so many recordings like this, I’ve realized 1) I need to get better at explaining where to find a bird in a particular tree—maybe employing the “clock face” technique,⁴ where you say a bird is “at 3 o’clock” or “at 10 o’clock, about a third of the way down,” etc. (the problem is, I rarely look at clock faces anymore, so this doesn’t come very naturally), and 2) pointing out a bird to a friend, or listening to a friend’s instructions about where to find a bird, takes up at least 90 percent of all group bird outings.

Thanks, Mom, for knowing where to find the red-headed woodpeckers and for wanting to go birding with me in the first place!

4. Cerulean Warbler

I took this recording on May 10, 2022, which has gone down in history as the Best Bird Day I Have Ever Experienced. I spent about 4 hours in the UW Madison Arboretum that morning racking up thrushes, vireos, and warblers with a bunch of other bird nerds, all of whom were absolutely buzzing with delight. I heard several grown men giggle that day out of pure joy.

In this audio clip, I get my lifer cerulean warbler—pretty rare for Madison. This is also the only time I would ever see this bird in Wisconsin.

At the beginning of the recording, you’ll hear a man’s voice say, “There’s a blue… You know, I hate to say this…” I love how hesitant he was to utter the name “cerulean warbler” aloud, like he might curse us all. Bird superstitions are powerful.

You’ll also hear me say, “It’s not as blue as I wanted it to be.” Forgive me, cerulean warblers! You are all perfect!

On this Best Bird Day, I saw 4 species of migratory thrush (veery, gray-cheeked, Swainson’s, and hermit), 4 species of vireo (red-eyed, warbling, blue-headed, and yellow-throated), and 16 species of warbler (ovenbird, black-and-white, Tennessee, Nashville, magnolia, Blackburnian, yellow, chestnut-sided, black-throated green, Wilson’s, common yellowthroat, American redstart, Canada, bay-breasted, golden-winged, and cerulean). To top it off I also saw a red-headed woodpecker and two barred owls.

A cerulean warbler flying away. (Photo by me)

5. Upland Sandpipers

Upland sandpipers—which are terrestrial shorebirds, which means they are NOT found in wetlands! So cool and strange!—are rare in Madison but can be consistently found at Thomson Memorial Prairie, which is one of the only dry prairies that still exists in Wisconsin. I trekked there with Michael and sedge-wren Ben during my last summer in Madison. Ben and I had made this trip once before, but I sprained my ankle in a hole and half walked, half crawled back to the car without seeing any sandpipers.

On this trip, our second, I unknowingly fondled a bunch of wild parsnip, which contains chemicals that can burn the crap out of your skin when activated by sunlight. After Ben pointed out my error, I spent the rest of the trip with my hands in my pockets to avoid the sun. It’s amazing I managed to take a Merlin recording at all.

I probably took this recording with the intention of putting it on eBird to prove my upland sandpiper sighting, but you can hear me in turn both making demands of the sandpiper and laughing at it. You can also hear what is known as the “wolf whistle” of an upland sandpiper (0:22 seconds), which, to me, sounds like one of those slide whistles you win at a carnival, where you slowly pull out the end and it bends the sound. You can also hear the sandpiper’s flight call (0:28 seconds). Other audible birds include eastern meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds, killdeer, and dickcissels (a fave!).

There were at least two upland sandpipers in the prairie that day, and we enjoyed watching and listening to them sail over their terrestrial sphere.

One of the only photos I managed to take of the upland sandpipers.

What have we learned?

One consistent theme of all of these recordings is that my accompanying photos are pretty crappy. I think this is an indication of my obsessive need to document a bird’s presence even when the angle isn’t right for photography. I record birds to validate my sightings, to reassure myself that I did see that bird, that it wasn’t just in my head. I have always been my family’s hoarder of memories, a journaler and scrapbooker, and that compulsion doesn’t go away when I’m birding.

What would happen if I left the house without my phone or my camera?

I’d see a rare bird, probably.

Or: I’d have a really nice walk where the strap of my camera isn’t digging into my shoulder, where my phone isn’t vibrating with incoming texts and emails, and where I can really appreciate all the lovely spring sounds and blooms around me.

Maybe one day!

Holly

1. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/08/05/1022041431/to-remember-the-moment-try-taking-fewer-photos

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28650721/

3. In case you’re wondering, Wisconsin is a one-party consent state for recording conversations, which means that you are allowed to record your conversations without receiving consent of the person or people you’re talking to. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, is a two-party state, which means you need consent from all parties to record your conversations. I can’t find any legal disclaimers about this on the Merlin site, so I wonder if they just assume this isn’t a problem and/or if they have some sort of legal protection from related issues since they are a third-party app. I’m not a lawyer, so maybe none of this matters!

4. There are other helpful tips for describing bird locations in this article: https://sfvaudubon.org/a-guide-to-bird-locating/