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The Killer App: Adventures in Birding
Lo, these many years ago, those of us in the early days of the personal computer industry, we who depended on the success of the technology-in-its-infancy for our livelihoods, lusted after something we dubbed “the killer app.” It had nothing to do with actual violence; we longed only for the delivery of a program useful enough to entice the reluctant and the technologically averse to pay what was–in those days–a substantial amount of money in order to bring this desktop-sized computer adversary into their own living rooms.
In those early days, Apple outdid IBM and its clones by a factor of several because it developed its own killer app: the school market. Remember the Apple IIGS? I do.
My dear friend made a healthy living selling them to school districts and families, while I, IBM, and the rest of the industry were still trying to puzzle out a market beyond the corporate. Along the way, Apple introduced VisiCalc. Another “home” killer app. Remember it? I do.
Perhaps the first “killer app” for the PC was Lotus 1-2-3. You have only to ask how many of your friends of a certain age, now Excel users all, still use the Lotus keyboard shortcuts. I do.
There were a few others, of late and sometimes unlamented, memory. Among them, the first–DOS-based–versions of Microsoft Word. Remember how to open a file? ([ESC] (to bring up the submenu at the bottom of the character-based screen) Transfer Load.) I do.
“This is the year of the home computer,” we used to say, starting in about 1985. “It always has been, and it always will be.”
Eventually, though–as history will show–we got there.
Along the way, even though my career, my paycheck, and my livelihood regularly depended on it, I never became an advocate of technology for its own sake. If it couldn’t benefit me, or–sometimes more importantly–the organization I worked for, if it had nothing to offer which might make my life, or its life, better or more interesting, I just couldn’t be bothered, and I could take it or leave it.
I waited, every time, for the killer app before I moved to the bigger, better deal. And I have never deviated from that, either professionally or personally.
Of course, things are a bit different now. But when I look at my iPhone, not so much. What are my installed apps? Well:
Calendar. Banking. Weather. Maps. Camera. Kindle. Audible. Two or three “comms” apps for text/audio/and video communication with those who are important to me. Bird and Plant identification. Night Sky visuals and constellation ID. Apple Watch. A couple of useful medical and veterinary “first-aid” apps. A few “shopping” apps for places I actually frequent. Slack. Fi (my dogs’ GPS, so I know where they are). A couple of news apps. Some utilities, including a compass, measurements converter, and a file browser app which lets me kick things around among the devices on my local network. Sonos, an app which lets me throw digital music stored on my local network at my wired old-fashioned speakers.
And that’s about it. No TikTok (I don’t even have an account). No Instagram. No Facebook. No Twitter X. (How funny is it that Musk–free-speech absolutist that he is–says he’s removing the “block” feature for all but DMs. LOL. Just sayin.’ Cannot wait for the fallout and–perhaps–the rowing back.)
I rarely add new apps into the mix.
But last week, I did.
The app I added is called Merlin Bird ID. It’s from Cornell Labs (as is my other birding app, which is based on visual ID). Merlin “listens” for bird songs, and identifies them from that.
It was recommended to me by my stepdaughter, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.
This morning, I set out on my somewhat regular two-mile walk, down the road, turn left, walk along the little stream (ruined by the undermining in 2018 and subsequently wrecked by the beavers, then repaired quite well by the coal company in 2021), turning at the corner, and walking back home. Some of you have even walked it with me over the years. You’ll remember.
I set Merlin to listen, fully aware that it might miss some sounds because it says it works best while you sit still, and I was on the move. However, during the course of a 40-minute or so recording–one in which I did sit–for a few minutes at a time–on a couple of little bridge abutments or on the crash barriers intended to stop drivers veering into the stream, it reported the following bird sounds (think of it, denizens of the PIT, as “longbird”):
Well over two dozen species, only one of which I haven’t observed here over the years. (The green-winged teal–the red dot indicates that it’s rare in this location. But the rest? I’ve seen them all, more or less regularly, yet on occasion rarely, so I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of Merlin, all the more so because the identification of water birds (teal, kingfisher, heron, mallard), only started once I came alongside the water)
And many times today, the app told me that a bird was in the vicinity (kingfisher, mallard, red-tailed hawk, heron) before I actually saw it, and confirmed its presence.
It was great fun! And the fact that the app highlights the song of the bird it’s currently ‘listening’ to is a great teaching tool. I think this might be a better identification guide than my other app, which is pictorial and which often depends on my knowing certain things about avian morphology and coloring that I may not, and involves questions I can’t always answer before it suggests a response.
So–I think, in terms of identifying birds–I think this might be the actual killer app, and I highly recommend it for those like me who are amateur bird watchers.
A small caveat:
This guy is quite annoyed. He’s spent the last few days hollering at great volume, from dawn to dusk, and often into the wee hours of the morning–as he always does, but even more so now–because he’d really like Merlin to ID him.
But it refuses to.
So, a shoutout here–to assuage his hurt feelings–to my Chinggis. Maybe he needs his own post.
Published in General
Can Merlin detect the difference between a Bell 206 JetRanger and a Eurocopter EC135?
The Merlin App is, indeed, amazing. There are times I wonder if it’s really got it right, but when I’m also able to visually identify what it’s hearing, I am stunned by the accuracy, like “How did you get that from a non-descript chirp!?”
Coincidentally, the most recent thing the Merlin app helped me identify was . . . a pair of Merlins. High in a tree making an awful racket. I was going to say “Sharp-shinned hawks.” But it kept pinging “Merlin” so . . . I’m going with it.
Great post. I was once tempted on one of those bird apps but I too will only download one out of necessity. My most used apps are the Major League Baseball app (I watch and follow games), podcasts (though this was installed with the phone I think), and Kindle. I probably should download the Audible app myself. I didn’t think of that. I listen on the kindle tablet but might be easier on the phone.
I love this app. Mrs. Spring is my best “google”for birds, but this is a close second. It is amazing what it picks out of the background.
I do spend some time arguing with it, though.
I recommend it for anyone.
The merlin app works great in Michigan. I have really enjoyed it. A couple of years ago I made a trip to Kauai, Hawaii. I was so looking forward to using the Merlin app there, and I downloaded all appropriate databases. Unfortuneatly, Merlin had minimal audio data for Kauai.
Probably not. But that sounds like an unmet need and therefore a potential marketing opportunity…
There are birds around here that I’ve never been quite sure if they are Cooper’s or Sharp-shinned hawks. (That’s one of the limitations of my own ignorance, and trying to work though the pictures and the questions, while only glimpsing them for a second or two before they see me and fly off.) It’ll be interesting to see what Merlin makes of them when the time is right.
As some of you have noted, it’s incredible how little it take to generate a bird ID, and how accurate it is–especially considering background noise, even just things like the wind rustling through the trees, deer wuffling around in the woods, and other small animals scrabbling about.
Oh, I missed Audible, I do have it on my phone, because it is easier. I can stick the phone in my pocket and listen while I walk or garden.
I’m curious to see what sounds Merlin picks up if I go down to the bottom of my field and along the edge of the woods. I’ve noticed a significantly different bird population down there to the one up the hill and closer to the house. There are cedar waxwings, scarlet tanagers, and I often hear owls.
Birdnet, also from Cornell, works great, too. It doesn’t require as much space. I downloaded the Merlin app long ago, but my phone at the time didn’t have enough memory for the required database. Got a new phone several weeks ago, downloaded the database for my new home, the Midwest, and, wowsers! Merlin took off like a scalded, um, grackle.
Most of my killer apps have been games . . .
All the years I spent listening to tapes, then CDs, then going through stored songs on the Audubon app just to get to where I could pick up about half of what the Merlin app does instantly…
Oh, I know. I’ve done all those things too. But in the week or so since I downloaded this app, I’ve probably learned more about the local avian population than in the last 37 years, ever since we moved out to the country where listening for, and watching, the birds is an actual possibility.
I’m remembering a book, sort of a “field guide” thing, quite bulky, with a slider and a couple of buttons on inside back “cover” which was thick, because it contained some sort of electronic gizmo which was programmed with “x” number of stored bird calls. After you thought you’d identified the bird from the photos, you could press a button which would play the selected bird’s call. If you were wrong, you started again. By that time, the bird had disappeared into the woods, or off into the field, and it was hopeless. At the time, it was a marvel.
My dad loathed technology until the day he died, but my best friend’s dad was an early adopter. First projection TV. Tricked out quadrophonic stereo playing Moog records. LaserDisc system. When PCs were first released, he needed one.
Mr. R walked into the computer store in Phoenix (there was just the one), and said, “I want one of those home computers.” The salesman, seeing dollar signs, said, “yes, sir … are you interested in word processing? Or perhaps a data spreadsheet where you could…”
“I don’t know what those words mean,” Mr. R. said, “Just give me a home computer.”
So I got to play clunky games on it with my friend, prank call people on the modem where you’d cradle the phone on an acoustic coupler, and save BASIC programs on a cassette tape. Don’t know if Mr. R ever figured out spreadsheets or word processing.
Which Star Trek episode is that alien from?
There’s more to it, but I could only find two clips:
Beautiful.
Mr. She and I began our IT journey together when he brought an IBM 5100 and a dot matrix printer home from Duquesne University for the Easter weekend. It must have been 1978 or so. He promptly decamped to bed with a horrible flu-like virus, leaving me to deal with three rather cranky young children who were “his” (but certainly not “mine”) for the weekend. Somewhere, in a copy of BYTE or similar, we discovered the code of the BASIC program for “Hunt the Wumpus.” We diligently typed it in, learning a lot on the fly about how programs worked as we went. And we had a blast.
It wasn’t long before the kids discovered that they could change the “PRINT” (text to appear on the screen) instructions to read things like “Michael has smelly feet!” before recognizing that a “Wumpus” was near. So we customized it to our liking, forging bonds along the way.
I still have that printout, which we made before Mr. She had to take the thing back the following week. I may ask for it to be buried with me.
Subsequently, we went with Atari’s line of computers–400s, 800s etc. (player-missile graphics!), before the first PCs came out. Along the way, I became very familiar with the “tape save” and then the “disk save.” I still have drawer-loads full of both, all of which still work. By the time the first PCs did come out, I was working for a Pittsburgh IBM dealer, and so our first PC (640K memory with the aid of an AST six-pack, two floppy disk drives, a 320×200 pixel, 4-color monitor ($680 just by itself, list price–I was selling them, remember?), no hard drive, with an OKI 320 dot-matrix printer) was the one with which we–before actual Windows came out–used a program called In-A-Vision which was bundled with a run-time version (much disk-swapping) version of Windows 1.0, and on which Mr. She put together–almost 40 years ago–the blueprints for the house we built together and which I still live in.
Such memories. Not all that long ago.
I think about Great Granny, who was born in 1869, four years after Lincoln was assassinated, and who died in 1968, just a few months before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. What a life!
And I wonder–will my great grandchildren say the same of me? It might be warranted if they did.
And:
Some of you who’ve been here might recognize the bones of the house which–in spite of some cosmetic adjustments, haven’t changed all that much since.
So many things I can’t quantify. So much to be grateful for.
I know only a tiny bit about birds – I can distinguish a cardinal from a blue jay from a robin. But a neighbor showed me Merlin a couple months ago, and I downloaded it to my phone. It is fun to sit out on the porch in the evening and see what birds it picks up. I’ve learned to identify the song of a Baltimore oriole and a few others.
Might be better than the Bud Zero referred to in another thread.
Back in the 70’s, I wrote software (for the Military, of course) that could tell the difference between fixed wing, helicopters and tanks from their seismic signature. The company where I worked also worked on a speech recognition system and is is argued that we had the first commercially available product.
It is at least in part that my experience makes me appreciate the accomplishment of Merlin even more.
Wow. That’s really nifty.
The first speech recognition system I had any truck with was Kurzweil, (early to mid 80s I think) first for the blind, and then as proposed for use in healthcare emergency departments. It wasn’t terrific, but–at the time–we thought it was amazing. How things have changed. Although–as I sometimes think when I attempt speech-to-text recognition on my iPhone–not always for the better.
Oh, and: