I am amazed how many people regard Merlin as reliable - everytime I experiment with it something very,very unlikely comes up. The most recent was it claiming Common Sandpiper every few minutes one morning - in my garden well away from anywhere one would be. It was a Blue Tit.
I'm with you on Merlin. All it does is encourage the fantasists among the newbie birders. People need to buckle down to using field guides and learning calls: there may be short-cuts in the future but there aren't at the moment.
I agree, I test it a few times a week on average and it rarely gets anything wrong (herring vs yl gull still an issue ;-)) but the old problems of chaffinch vs redstart call etc seem to have been ironed out
I reckon that’s about right. Another limitation is probably down to hardware rather than software. It often doesn’t hear things that I can hear (never the other way around).
Maybe it depends where ... repeatedly testing it on my land, I find it frequently misidentifies about 20-30% of calls, and further simply misses another 10-30% (usually far away birds than I can still do, but it's not picking up, but occasionally closer ones too).
It does okay on Chaffinches, but a variety of others it mixes, including calling my Whooper Swans as Cranes last week.
Or to look at that from the other perspective, one in ten of its guesses will be wrong, even of the birds it can hear - which may or may not be what you are listening to. That's far too high for a marketed product, I hope nobody is paying for this.
Do you mean this?
Hahaha.
