Merlin may be best known as the wizard in King Arthur’s court, but Merlin is also a bird species and an iPhone app. The app is somewhat magical – you enter a bird photo, add where and when it was taken and Abracadabra! Merlin gives you a detailed description of the bird you’ve just found. Well, actually the Merlin app is not a wizard; it’s an algorithm – the sequences of logic that make up artificial intelligence. And it’s not perfect, not even close. A birder cannot rely on Merlin alone to provide perfectly accurate bird IDs, but the app does point you in the right direction, most of the time.
Which is exactly what it did for me today. Merlin pointed me toward its namesake in fact: The Merlin, and this species, I’ve now discovered, is quite accurate and elegant. The Merlin is a type of falcon. It’s small, agile, and a fierce hunter. It eats other birds. Yikes. But that’s the nature of nature. Oh yes, and the Merlin has yellow legs – one of the fascinating bird features that led me to begin this big year. I didn’t know the species of bird I’d captured with my camera today until I entered the photo of this yellow legged beauty into my iPhone app and Abracadabra! There was my very own Merlin.
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