• That Night Feeling

    By Whitney Grover

    Photo by Keith Maley

    It’s dark but only just dark, maybe a street light or a bright moon casts a blue glow over the world. You feel a little lonely but also exhilarated, not at all tired. The first stars twinkle and the vastness of the night sky adds to your mixed emotions, something between melancholy and tranquility. What you are feeling is That Night Feeling. There’s a small dimly lit corner of the internet devoted to expressing it and trying to capture it with images. The subreddit, r/thatnightfeeling, wraps up the description, “homesick for something you can’t quite remember.”

    Is this what a Swainson’s Thrush feels the night it decides to leave the comfort of the only home it’s ever known to find a jungle 3,000 miles away? On a cool fall evening here in the bay, the sun sets, and perhaps the young bird is overwhelmed with That Night Feeling and takes off into the darkness, heading on its epic migratory journey to Central America. 

    Or perhaps I’m taking too much liberty, anthropomorphizing. I will say, thinking about the hundreds of thousands of birds that take to the skies in North America every night during the fall migration adds to my Night Feeling. I am in absolute awe of their migration and their ability to arrive in places they have never been before, using the stars and natural night sky to navigate. But that awe is dampened, or maybe electrified, by fear, dread for the labors they face along the way.

    There are the dangers that have always been there: you could have always gotten lost, you could have always misjudged the weather and gotten caught in a storm, you could have always succumbed to a predator waiting in ambush for the moment you land. But now there are new challenges, challenges you didn’t have the chance to prepare for: your main navigational tool is gone, you can no longer see the stars, you can no longer see a dim haze of last light on the horizon. The landscape is sprinkled with dozens of glowing orbs brighter than any moon. Where there were trees there are now buildings, invisible to you but hard enough to stop you dead in your tracks. The creeks are gone and instead, streams of cars transect the landscape. New predators wait in ambush.

    The super bright skyglow emanating from large cities attracts birds.…

  • Audubon Leadership Conference 2025

    By Whitney Grover 

    Every two years, National Audubon hosts a conference for chapter leaders, campus chapters, partner organizations, and state and national representatives. This year, the conference was held in Montreal, Canada, and I had the honor of attending and representing Golden Gate Bird Alliance. Physically being near the boreal forest and the northern stretch of our North American migrant’s range kept the hemispheric focus of Audubon’s bird conservation top of mind. The theme of the conference this year was “soaring together.” As one speaker put it best, it’s easy to gloss over the phrase as cliché, but when you think about it, the meaning is bold. 

    Photo provided Audubon California

    The biggest takeaway for me was, indeed, this concept of working together for a common goal. There are armies of us out there, spread all across North and South America, and we all care about the same thing. If we can work in our separate regions, but in a more coordinated way, we really can accomplish our high-level goal of bending the bird curve. The heart of this coordination and strategy is National Audubon’s current strategic plan Flight Plan, bringing this home and applying it locally is how our coordination will continue beyond this quick gathering.

    Hairy Woodpecker by Whitney Grover

    The conference held sessions on branding, strategic diplomacy, EDIB conservation principles, inclusivity in Christmas Bird Count organizing, building a high impact board, MOTUS, storytelling sessions, and special breakout sessions for large-staffed chapters (which we are considered, the cutoff for “large” being over 5 full-time staff). But beyond the programming, I learned so much from other chapter leaders and met some amazing people. I talked forest management with conservationists who had been working in the field for as long as I’ve been alive. I learned how information acquired from bird banding stations can be applied from campus chapter undergraduates just finding their place in this work. I learned strategies for welcoming underserved communities from small towns and metropolises. 

    In the storytelling sessions, I presented our Birding for Everyone Fellowship program in a panel focused on “Community Driven Programming.” It was motivating and heartening to see all the faces in the room representing so many different towns and cities, all their excellent questions, all there because they care about what we care about. I shared the stage with representatives from NYC Bird Alliance and DC Bird Alliance, and we all brought to the room our experiences and learnings of what works and what doesn’t work in serving communities previously left behind by our conservation and birding communities. …

  • The Power of Suggestion Part II: The Wizards behind Merlin Sound ID

    By Ryan Nakano

    Two weeks ago I wrote about Merlin Sound ID in response to a long-time member’s inquiry about the automated bird identification tool’s accuracy. At best the article captured the use cases for such an incredibly powerful tool in light of its imperfections and within the context of learning to identify birds. At worst, it flushed readers due to the article’s unnecessary length, or worse still, flushed beginner birders from using Merlin Sound ID out in the field.

    I hope it was more the former and less the latter, regardless, I never answered the original question that prompted the article in the first place — how accurate is Merlin Sound ID? 

    Hence, Part II. This go around I went straight to the source and spoke to one of the many wizards behind the magic — Lead Developer of Merlin Sound ID, Dr. Grant Van Horn. 

    Alright bird nerds, time to get in the weeds on machine learning, recall, precision, and pattern recognition. 

    Q: How accurate is Merlin Sound ID? 

    GVH: “Because we’re running in real time and the metrics we care about revolve around recognizing every vocalization being produced, we have to optimize two metrics: precision and recall. This notion of “accuracy” is a term that is convenient for English speakers but it doesn’t quite match the machine learning requirements.”  

    According to Van Horn, precision in this case is concerned with how often Merlin correctly identifies the presence of a particular bird species (the inverse being a false positive). Whereas, recall is concerned with how often Merlin detects the presence of a particular bird species to begin with (the inverse being a false negative). 

    As far as Merlin Sound ID is concerned, the tool’s baseline goalpost is 90% precision and 70% recall for every bird species its currently trained on. What this means in layman’s terms, is that when you hit record on Merlin Bird ID and it picks up a bird vocalization, 9 times out of ten it will have predicted the correct bird species and when you hear a bird species vocalize, 7 times out of 10 Merlin will be confident enough to make a prediction. Again these are the baseline metrics that Merlin Sound ID is checked against by its designers and will vary from species to species in “accuracy”. 

    Ultimately of course, the goal is 100% on both metrics for all bird species, but this is the standard set for the tool in order to release a particular species into the wild (Merlin-user community) so to speak. …

  • The power of suggestion: Birding in the Age of AI

    By Ryan Nakano

    Whenever I hear the phrase “the power of suggestion”, I immediately think of magic, or rather, the role of the magician. Suggestion allows the magician to influence our perceptions in order to pull off stunning feats that feel real, sometimes real enough to make a lasting impression on the way we see the world. For birders in the modern age, just like townsfolk in the Arthurian legend, the most prominent and powerful magician hands-down is the one and only Merlin. 

    When an email “Is there any data on Merlin Sound ID accuracy?” apparated out of thin air and into my inbox from our GGBA listserv, I clicked and disappeared down a rabbit hole.

    Note: This blog does not answer the original poster’s question (apologies Steve). Rather, what started as a single question, multiplied very rapidly into a steady stream of questions, aka, more rabbits — how does Merlin sound ID even work? If a bird chirps in a forest but only AI identifies it, can it really be listed? If you only use Merlin are you truly “birding”? What does using AI mean for your potential to learn bird species? Maybe more importantly, what might using AI mean for our relationship to birds, other birders, and nature in general?

    The Reveal

    Okay, before we get back to the rabbit hole, it feels important to break the cardinal rule for all magicians, we must reveal (at least slightly) how the act is done. In this case, we must explain what Merlin Sound ID is and how it works. 

    Merlin Sound ID, is an AI machine learning feature of Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin Bird ID App. The Merlin app more generally, assists users in identifying birds from live recordings (Merlin Sound ID), by your photos, and through other tools like its “step-by-step” function, using location and observed field markings. 

    For the purposes of this blog, pay no mind to the other features. We are only here for Merlin Sound ID. 

    Trust me, it’s more than enough. 

    The Merlin Sound ID works by capturing your recording in the field in real-time, mapping the frequencies in the recording visually via a spectrogram. Enter — magic, or, the power of suggestion. 

    The Macaulay Library holds nearly 2.4 million sound recordings of birds, making it the largest repository of bird audio in the world. Using a machine learning model (deep convolutional neural network, whatever that means), Merlin Sound ID has been trained on at least 140 hours of bird audio from the Library that’s been tagged by sound ID experts to correspond to specific species.…

  • Ear Birding with LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired

    By Helen Doyle, Jeanette Pettibone, and Daniel Scali

    Dan interrupted us halfway around our introductory circle. “Did you hear that?” Several people had heard the bird chipping nearby. For those who didn’t, Dan tried to orient the group: “Off to the left, a little in front of me.” We remained quiet, listening for the chip notes. Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s (GGBA)s first birding field trip with Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, an organization that “promotes independence, community, and equity created by and with blind and low vision people,” took place on October 25, 2024 during Birdability Week. It all started with listening.

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    A group of eight people and one dag talking in a circle outside.Trip leaders Dan Scali (left) and Jeanette Pettibone (right) with new birders from LightHouse. Photo @ Helen Doyle

    Listening can be a challenge at Salesforce Park, an urban rooftop park located in the busy SOMA neighborhood of downtown San Francisco. Although it’s four stories above the street, the sound of trucks, buses, and sirens below forced us to concentrate in order to block out background noise. Despite the noise, trip leaders Dan Scali and Jeanette Pettibone chose this birding hotspot for its central location, accessibility, and ability to bring in other sensory experiences. The flat, wide, paved path that loops the park is bordered by a waist-high railing with a wealth of plants native to California and other Mediterranean climates within reach. This offered opportunities for the participants to feel, smell, and for some, see, the leaves and flowers of the plants hosting birds.

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    A group of eight people, some with white canes. on a pathway in a park.The group explores plants as well as birds at Salesforce Park. .
    Photo @ Helen Doyle

    We identified 11 bird species, mostly by ear. The chip notes of a Yellow-rumped Warbler, the chattering of White-crowned Sparrows in a bush four feet in front of us, the electric buzz of Anna’s Hummingbirds flying overhead, the typewriter-like sounds of a Ruby-crowned Kinglet. As much as the sounds themselves gave a clue to the bird’s identity, so did the location. The sparrows stayed in the bushes or foraged for food on the grassy lawn. The Black Phoebe flew quickly over the lawn from its perch and back, catching flying insects in midair. The warblers stayed higher in the trees. For each bird, Dan and Jeanette described the sounds, location, behavior and appearance, including color, patterns, and size.…