BANGOR DAILY NEWS • July 14, 2022
Birding-by-ear is my sole superpower. I don’t recognize 100 percent of all the bird noises in Maine. I’m probably down somewhere around 99 percent. So I was shocked to hear an unknown bird noise this week. It sounded like a raptor, but not one that I recognized. It was my perfect opportunity to try out Merlin — a free app for smartphones that can identify bird sounds. I held my phone in the direction of the weird call, and Merlin instantly told me it was a sharp-shinned hawk. I recommend Merlin, an app offered by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology from its website at Merlin.AllAboutBirds.org. Given that Merlin can make mistakes, I agree with the old adage: trust but verify. ~ Bob Duchesne