@lies, I have some questions about birdwatching, and about Merlin’s Sound ID feature.
As your #1 birding cheerleader this all makes me really happy. Go you!
#1: Flicker silhouette. The thing about IDing a bird based on only a single characteristic (like by only seeing its silhouette, or only hearing a brief vocalization) is that it’s like doing a trapeze act without a net. You really want to have a solid-enough basis of experience to assess the likelihood that your ID could be wrong before you rely on yourself to get it right with just that one piece of evidence. If you can get additional confirmatory evidence your confidence can go way up really fast, but until then you’re relying on yourself to have a complete and accurate enough mental map of the possibilities that you can say “yup; this possibility is the ONLY one that makes sense.”
I’ve seen a lot of flickers, and their silhouette is pretty distinctive. You probably should feel comfortable that you saw a big woodpecker, and one that likes to perch up in the open at the top of a tree, and from what I know about the birds in your area that sounds a LOT like a flicker. I guess another possibility (that would be a lot less likely) would be a Lewis’s Woodpecker. I don’t know if you ever get those around there.
Being overconfident about one’s ID skills is a common pitfall of birders at pretty much every level of experience. You will always be wrestling with it. I wrestle with it. Birders much better than I am wrestle with it. Over time you’ll wrestle with it for harder IDs, but it never goes away. It sounds to me like you’re engaging with that problem in the right way. Keep questioning yourself. Whenever you can, try to follow up on your initial, single-data-point IDs to see if they hold up when you get additional evidence, and file the results away for future reference.
#2: Merlin Sound IDs White-throated Sparrow. Merlin Sound ID is amazingly good, but it does have a significant false-match rate. When they were tuning its machine-learning algorithm they had a choice of how “aggressive” to make it. They could make it super conservative, where it only suggested an ID if it was virtually certain. But then it would only make suggestions a small percentage of the time. Or they could make it super permissive, and it would be making lots of suggestions all the time — but many of those suggestions would be wrong. They basically tuned the dial to get a lot of suggestions with a small but acceptable number of false suggestions. My sense from playing around with it when it first came out is that it had a false-suggestion rate around 10%. Maybe that has improved since then, but I’m not sure.
For me, I’d want to get a look at the alleged White-crowned Sparrow to confirm that’s what Merlin was really hearing. You absolutely could have a lone White-crowned Sparrow hanging around, either by itself or with the local White-crowns. But it could also be the case that Merlin misheard one of the hundreds of local White-crowns working out its song (which doesn’t sound THAT different from White-throated) and made a mistake.
So I’d say it’s an intriguing possibility! But you should verify.
3: duetting Great Horned Owls. This one sounds pretty solid to me. Great Horned Owl hooting is pretty hard to mistake for anything else. Two of them duetting, with one being on a slightly higher pitch than the other but both having that same basic Great Horned Owl pattern, to me sounds like a lock. I’d probably report it.
In conclusion: Yay for your awesome birding! 🙂👍
Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/666566811060518912.
