Merlin is famous for producing some hilarious misidentifications, as well - don't rely on it too much. It's right in this case.
John
Mark
Many thanks. Presumably it has continued to 'learn' since then as well. A friend was using a plant App recently with which he was impressed.
All the best
I think (I don't keep records of this sort of thing) the examples I saw (perhaps some while ago) were in the ID forum on here, and the app may have struggled with less than perfect photos. I imagine it would need very good data to do Common vs Wilson's Snipe? The trouble is it is most likely to be used by people who aren't ID gurus and most likely not photography aces either: but what they may well be is accustomed to putting their faith in software....
I expect we've all had the experience of spotting a wildlife error on the TV and then having a partner or other party argue that the expert on there said it was so it must be. This is no different.
John
I will have a look for the thread. I do remember something but clearly not with the same final impression. It was a BBRC member that was impressed with it rather than my wife......
Mind you occasionally the inexperienced actually look at birds. I remember handing the Pagham Sandplover photos to our lodger and she had no hesitation matching it to the atrifons Lesser Sandplover in Shorebirds. Something that appeared beyond the observers in the field before its departure. 3
All the best
John, a couple of comments on Merlin here.
I was actually one of the people who helped "train" the app by manually going through and verifying/rejecting identifications. This was several years ago in the app's early stages (beta, actually!). I remember several egregious misidentifications on these forums, as well as several misidentifications on eBird where the checklist comments were simply "identified by Merlin app", no apparent observer effort.
Well, lets give it a chance. But lets not pass up the chance to remark that any birder will learn more by doing it themselves - or does the app tell you why the bird is what it is?
John
I know this might sound terribly luddite, but I can't think of any circumstances where I would want to be told what I'm looking at by a computer. Isn't the process of identification a large part of the hobby?
I wonder who benefits from this app, apart from the sort of bird togs who don't own binoculars or a field guide? Certainly not novice birders who should be poring over a field guide and their field notes.
I know, bah humbug... old man shouting at clouds!
Non-birding members of the public, people who feed birds in their back garden and get an unusual visitor, people who are on holiday, people who don't own books.......
I often get asked by non-birding friends, non-birding family members and non-birding work colleagues to identify birds. The latest was the security guard at my office who had a juvenile European Starling visit his feeder.
Anything that encourages people to engage with nature and broadens that and maybe gets people into birdwatching is good news. I have a friend who uses the plant identification equivalent.
I occasionally spend time playing with the quiz, very rarely reidentifying or flagging photos and on the odd occasion having my own photos corrected though I swear my Great Cormorant identified as a Common Buzzard was a labelling error!
All the best
I expect we've all had the experience of spotting a wildlife error on the TV and then having a partner or other party argue that the expert on there said it was so it must be. This is no different.
John
Fair comment, but is this really engaging with nature? Isn't it better to get such people involved in the process of ID rather than just giving them the answer on a plate? We've got a wetland centre locally where kids come to learn about wildlife. It has TV monitors and live cameras you can operate with a joystick. All I ever see is the kids playing with the cameras rather than looking out of the windows with binoculars at the actual birds.
According to the one game of Trivial Pursuit I played many years ago, the bird whose Latin name is Crex Crex is the Grey Partridge. The glee on the faces of the other three members of the family when I got it 'wrong' was enough to convince me to never play the game again - and I haven't, since that moment. (Then again, as I like to state while making my excuses not to join in another game, the things I know about aren't trivial.