Merlin

There is more than Ticks and Chiggers here in the Forest

My last Post, Tick Season !, got me more “unsubscribes” than any other of my Posts. Yes, well, I’ve got some others in the works that I’m sure will top that!

And it’s not only Ticks and Chiggers here in the forest. This morning, sitting out on my porch for 1/2 hour, I got to listen to (and Merlin identified) 30 different birds:

• Northern Cardinal

• Wood Thrush

• Purple Finch

• American Goldfinch

• Pine Warbler

• Chipping Sparrow

• Red Bellied Wood Pecker (which has NO red on its belly, and Enquiring Minds wish to know how it got that name. The answer, as explained to me by a female biologist, is simple: all these birds were named by drunk color-blind males).

• Brown-headed Cowbird

• Mourning Dove

• Eastern Phoebe

• Blue Jay

• Least Flycatcher

• Eastern Towhee

• Ruby-crowned Kinglet

• Red-shouldered Hawk

• Scarlet Tanager

• Red-winged Blackbird

• Wild Turkey

• Dark-eyed Junco

• Carolina Chickadee

• American Crow

• Eastern Wood-Pewee

• Canada Goose

• Blue-winged Warbler

• Carolina Wren

• Tufted Titmouse

• Rose-breasted Grosbeak

• Red-Tailed Hawk

• American Robin

• Yellow-rumped Warbler

And there are many other birds around (e.g., the Starling, Humming Bird, Vultures, Eagles, Geese, ….

You may enjoy downloading the free App Merlin from Cornell Lab of Ornithology and learn to identify bird songs. I think this is an example of a good use of “Big Data”. In the old days, people would go out, listen and look for birds, and write them down into notebooks. Today, millions of people can have their phones listening to birds everyday all over the world. And imagine all that DATA! Being able to look at the locus of a species as it migrates, and comparing it to previous years!

I proposed such an App to the Audubon Society about 20 years ago. I enjoy signal-processing and thought it would be Phun to work on the algorithms for identifying bird calls; I also thought how cool it would be to have access to all that DATA! They wrote back to me expressing “Privacy Concerns”. Yep, Cornell Labs gets to listen to everything I say while running their Merlin App, which I rarely run in my bedroom.

And, I’m pretty sure, Google, the NSA and their AI’s listen to me all the time.