For most of my life I have suffered from avian ID blindness, the inability to tell birds apart. I blame a college professor.

This professor, who never went outside if he could avoid it, dazzled my algorithm-loving youthful self with his efficient method for identifying fine feathered friends: If it’s small then it’s a robin and if it’s big then it’s a crow, unless you can smell the ocean, in which case it’s a seagull. 

That’s all you really need to know, he said, and for a long time I followed suit.

No longer. Now I will casually say “Hear that? Sounds like a red-breasted nuthatch” as if I was one of those bird-watchers who visit Patagonia to pad their life list. 

The difference is Merlin, the Cornell Ornithology Lab program that one colleague described as “bird Shazam.” (That’s Shazam as in the app which identifies songs after listening to a snippet, not Shazam as in Captain Marvel’s magic word.) 

Download Merlin onto your phone – for free – and when you hear some birdsong it will tell you within seconds what species made the call as long as it’s one of 400 birds common to the Northeast. This has proved a gateway drug into birding for me and seems to have done the same for a lot of people who previously hadn’t gone beyond what Dr. Pamela Hunt, New Hampshire Audubon’s senior biologist, calls being “bird-curious.”

“It has definitely gotten more and more people interested in birds,” Hunt said, telling a story of visiting a farm when “some random guy driving a truck down the middle of the farm tells me: ‘My Merlin says it’s so-and-so!’”

I asked Hunt’s opinion because she’s the driving force behind a new website from New Hampshire Audubon. It takes the group’s State of the Birds report, a once-per-decade look at New Hampshire’s avian population, and makes it accessible and alive. 

Article continues after...

Yesterday's Most Read Articles

When is your car inspection due? Maybe never

Inside the government efficiency campaign that cut $2 million from the Merrimack Valley schools’ budget

‘What the hell is going on?”: Chichester votes to defund entire town administrative office, but may reconsider

USDA eliminates two local food programs that help the NH Food Bank and local schools

Sunshine Week: Searchable database of what Concord city employees were paid in 2024

Loudon Road bridge in Concord up for repair as federal funding gets shaky

Your Daily Puzzles

Cross|Word

Flipart

Typeshift

SpellTower

Really Bad Chess

Information comes from breeding bird surveys, Christmas bird counts and the Backyard Winter Bird Survey, as well as knowledge about each species’ biology, habits, and the state of its habitat in New Hampshire. With data starting in the mid-sixties, some species details go back 50 years.

“We started last April with a website company. I spent six months cranking away at content, a database,” Hunt said. “We’re going to add a few more species now that it’s live … add new photos, update population trends when we get more data.”

While it doesn’t help instantly identify a bird, the site (stateofthebirds.nhaudubon.org/) provides details and context to understand what’s there now, what used to be here, and what will be here down the road if we don’t act to rein in climate change.

If Merlin’s my jumping-off point, this is the next step to fix avian blindness.  And there are plenty of ways to go even further, including a UNH Extension online class called “Introduction to Bird Identification, Ecology & Habitats,” in session through June. 

There’s a lot of demand, it seems. For whatever reason – Hunt points to pandemic lockdowns that forced people outdoors – bird-watching has become much more popular in recent years. A 2022 survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said that more than 96 million people in the U.S. are birdwatchers of some sort, which is roughly one-third of the adult population. 

“We get random questions all the time about birds,” said Hunt. “Now the volunteer naturalist can send a link, people can look  it up and find more if they want.”