Merlin Sound ID - helpful but not diagnostic

[timm...@gmail.com]

Hi everyone,

This is probably preaching to the choir but it's an important issue that should be shared with newer birders. The MD eBird review team, as well as several other record-keeping types throughout MD, have noticed a huge uptick in questionable bird reports that have been "confirmed" by the Merlin Sound ID app. This is a great tool but it's not diagnostic. Please help us communicate this to newer birders. Russ Ruffing wrote an excellent summary of this issue which I've copied/pasted below.

Tim Carney

Parkville, MD

MD eBird Review Team

Birders,

Many of you are familiar with and users of the bird ID app, Merlin, and its audio ID functionality. It can be a fantastic tool to help with bird identification, and we have personally seen it perform impressive identifications that were visually confirmed as correct. On the other hand, the app can be mind-numbingly wrong, not only mis-identifying actual bird sounds but also mistaking many common non-bird sounds (frogs, car alarms, mechanical noises, and many others) as actual bird species. It will also miss frequently on birds that sound similar (Chipping Sparrow vs. Worm-eating Warbler vs. Pine Warbler for example) or on known mimics like European Starlings (which do dead-on Killdeer and pewee imitations, among others) and mockingbirds, which have an amazing repertoire (we've heard our neighborhood mockers imitate 35+ species alone). 

If you are an eBird user, over-reliance on Merlin poses several problems. Far too often, eBird checklists include a comment like "confirmed by Merlin" as support for an observation. To be blunt, Merlin cannot confirm anything, and should never be used as the justification for why you made an identification. Merlin can only offer the best matches for a sound that it processes, and all such recordings are exposed to such a wide variety of variables that in some cases it can make it impossible for the app to even get in the correct "zipcode" so to speak. In talking to some eBird reviewers, the use of Merlin in this casual fashion is reaching pandemic proportions and is dramatically increasing the amount of errors that are submitted to eBird. It is also making their reviews much more difficult and time-intensive. 

So please...if you are relying on Merlin to "confirm" your ID's, that's fine and that is a personal choice...but leave it at that. Please don't enter such ID's on an eBird checklist unless you've independently verified the ID yourself, preferably through visual ID but if not, with a good recording that you can compare with known sources or even get others' opinions on.

Sincerely,

Russ Ruffing, Joe Hanfman, Jo Solem, and Tim Carney