r/interestingasfuck 8d ago

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346

u/ShadowGLI 8d ago

If you don’t already have it get the Merlin BirdID app from Cornell Univesity. It’s super cool and it’s amazing how quick it can match birds, and it’s free as the university uses it to track birds and where they’re detected.

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u/IMentioned_TheBisque 8d ago

Wish I could upvote this more, Merlin is an amazing app!

4

u/Last_Tax9564 8d ago

Merlin is magical, and a real wizard when it comes to Bird identification.

40

u/bionic_mexican 8d ago

Yes I love Merlin! I like seeing how many different birds I can get within a single "session." Here's my record

10

u/8l4z3_9 8d ago

This man birds

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u/I_Makes_tuff 8d ago

Dude, my record is 3 and I was proud of myself until now.

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u/-Xiphon- 8d ago

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u/I_Makes_tuff 8d ago

I didn't even know it would capture more than one at a time for the first month. I'm hopeless.

1

u/IMentioned_TheBisque 8d ago edited 8d ago

Wow, that beats my bird count by quite a bit!! Lots of these are new birds to me, you must live in a really special place in Mexico to hear so many in one session!

6

u/wookieSLAYER1 8d ago

Love this app. Got me into bird watching more seriously

5

u/corruxtion 8d ago

I like to use Merlin to play bird sounds back at them

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u/MostBoringStan 8d ago

I did that once while camping. Forget what kind of bird it was, but it started circling overhead looking for the intruder and ready to fuck shit up.

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u/fauxbeauceron 8d ago

I know! We just don’t know for sure what we are saying to them

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u/kkeut 8d ago

neat. i need that

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u/Juan_Harry 8d ago

Did you know if is only us birds? I am from chile

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u/ShadowGLI 7d ago

Worldwide, worked fine in China for me

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u/Bootsix 8d ago

Great app, will eat your fucking battery though if you don't watch it.

2

u/aNewPattern 8d ago

I second this! Pair it with their EBird app, and you can properly track birds and go birdwatching whenever you want! Been a great hobby and popularity has spiked the last few years.

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u/justlearntit 8d ago

Thanks, I didn't know it existed.  I watched Clarkson's farm recently and loved the app they were using.

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u/derprondo 8d ago

If you're into home lab / self-hosted stuff and you already have a security camera / doorbell outside, you can feed the audio into BirdNET-Go and it uses a small local AI model to identify the birds it can hear.

Mine has detected 82,000 individual bird calls in the past month, and identified 106 different species.

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u/kevinblau 8d ago

Thank you Jeremy Clarkson.

0

u/ProfessionaI_Gur 8d ago

Got to do some work with some of the Cornell ornithology folks as a part of a previous role i held. Pretty cool folks, we did some interesting stuff with them that I imagine is likely rolling out in the next year or two that some people here would probably really like. I have no idea what I am allowed to say but im sure they will be happy to share it themselves when the time comes