"I was sitting in solitude earlier this summer in an Adirondack chair in my backyard, when I realized I wasn’t as alone as I’d thought.

Thanks to the app I’d just downloaded on my phone — the popular and free Merlin Bird ID — I learned just from listening that I was surrounded by more than a dozen species of birds. Where before I had simply heard birdsong, I now realized how rich the variety was in that single moment.

I ran Merlin’s “Sound ID” feature for half an hour. At first, the usual suspects for my neighborhood outside of Boston popped up: robins and blue jays, ubiquitous throughout the Eastern U.S. and easily recognizable. Then other birds, like the northern cardinal and the goldfinch."

Tracee M. Herbaugh reports for the Associated Press September 7, 2023. [2]