Identifying Birds with the Merlin App | The MeatEater Podcast 

I love that you guys have been dipping into birding a bit more, I think all hunters could benefit from a knowledge of birds and other non-game species. Helps pass the slow time afield, if nothing else!

Awesome guests - thanks for having them! I’ve gotten my life list to 70 I believe and it’s a competition between me and my wife now. Really neat app and showed us what is in our backyard.

It made me happy at how happy and passionate she was to be on the pod lol

The Big Year, a great birding movie. Birding is such a great hobby.

I've spent many many hours on bluebird days in a duck blind bored to death, until I took up birding. Over the last 15 years my duck hunting has been far more enjoyable because there's always birds around you in a marsh to listen to and watch that keep your interest when ducks aren't flying. I always knew they were around me, but I just never took the time during the off season to go out into marshes and learn the various non-game residents out there. Now I essentially go bird hunting 12 months out of the year except during about 9 months it's just with a camera and binoculars.

great group of people to do this interview with!

I really enjoy they types of the pod. Very informative.

4 right here! The most so far on the three RU-vid episodes I have watched.

I am loving the podcast video uploads! Thanks

The lady in the blue shirt is great. She keeps peeking to her right with this funny look on her face. Good information, great job MeatEater team!

Great Show

My wife and I have been using the Merlin app for a few years now, it's fantastic! So cool to see and hear from Jessie and every one else. Thanks Steve!

I found the app a year ago when trying to identify what ended up being a Green Heron that nested in my cedar trees in the back yard. I’ve recommended it to so many friends and family members that tell me they use it all the time. Now I’m going to also use it to practice my turkey calls!

Really outstanding podcast! The links between bird communities and habitat quality, health, and scale of change is really well explained! 23:29

Need to have the official meateater christmas bird count podcast

Absolutely fascinating! Just downloaded the app. :)

Im a ebirder and hunter. Love doing the 2 passions together. But NOW, Ill wait to submit my waterfowl and grouse records til after hunting season. :) Great conversation and nice flow of information. Thank you

Their downloads are very slow...after this podcast. ;) Awesome interview.

My wife has this. The first thing I did was bust out the turkey calls. The second thing was try to make owl and crow calls lol

Great podcast! I love birding (owls being my favourite) although I'm a newbie so the merlin app is an incredible tool for someone with entry level knowledge. Some of my favourite memories while hunting involve birds (like seeing my first northern saw-whet owl land beside me while in the stand) and like others have stated it's a great way to pass the hours when hunting is slow.

It’s like PokémonGo for birds

I'm somewhat excited to see all the species of ducks on my ponds before setting out the decoys this season!

I hope you guys enjoyed your trip to Ithaca - the heart of the Finger Lakes. Get out see the lakes and sites??

Merlin has been an amazing app. From first bird books with ebird to this, it upped my birding gaming. Now that its all on one device and my expertise has increased through the years, i actively have birding lists going while out small game and deer hunting. Overall its increased my hunting experiences and made me more aware of the environment and habitats around me.

Learned more about bird's in this podcast than i have in 36 years good guestions good job 👍👍👍

Great conversation! The Cornell folks are amazing. Merlin is pretty cool -- not perfect and has a few issues mis-identifying some species but its a great tool. I started birding in 2020 and I'm up to 223 species confirmed sighted (I don't count Merlin ID's unless I confirm visually).

I'm from southwest Minnesota, and can't remember the last time I saw a red headed woodpecker (bird) or a jackrabbit (four legged ;). We care for 2 dozen wood duck houses and it helps us with our Fall game bag count ;) . Thanks for the great program! Love the Merlin app!

I have been using merlin for 2 years now. I got my life list up to 104. I don't use ebird as much but have it too. I wouldn't mind if they took my data from merlin, I thought that was the point.

The old man taught me, a quality field guide is must, when on stand. They should've showed Steve the migration map for the Kirkland's Warbler. Very cool story to this bird and a cool Michigan tie-in.

I think with the quail decline, I’m not hearing enough people talk about how millions of acres of pine plantations are regularly and systematically turned from 20-30 year old budding ecosystems for birds, into scorched earth.

my pug was doing some snorts and grunts when i had the merlin app open listening for birds and it showed up as a great egret

My son and i built a bird house this spring and i thought we got it out too late but we had a family of red eyed vireos nest in our bird house.

Merlin is an awesome app when I am out in the wild. It has really been fun to ID birds

My sister and mom can't get it to work on their iPhones. My Samsung has no issue. I love it

Merlin Bird Identifier is great

Dang, I wish I knew you were in Ithaca, I would’ve tried to meet you and get you to fish in my lake and talk about it with you!

My dad and grandpa used to hunt grouse and now I’ve never even seen one.

Love the app. Been using it since around this time last year.

Strangely. I started listening to this and I now have a hummingbird stuck in my shop.

I just downloaded the app. 👍 Canada geese and mallard numbers are up here in BC. Grouse numbers fluctuate yearly. I get to see the odd golden eagle which is cool. Thanks for sharing all of their stories and information. 😎👍

One of my nerd coworkers got this app a while ago. I downloaded it because of him. It’s a really fun app. It’s super cool.

You gotta be kidding me. This was my best kept secret to scouting upland. Every bird hunter in the country is now going to be using this🤦🏻‍♂️

Neat app. Love it

If Cal was there he would’ve said “All the Pelicans we shot are full of lead!”

One of my favorite episode's. I think I learned more on this episode than I have on any other episode. Thanks for always helping us to expand our knowledge!

First is the worst, second is the best.

Great app! Since I heard about it a few podcasts ago, I've been using it almost every day! Feel like a pokemon trainer, collecting all the local birds! Haha

Seen a Pileated Woodpecker few weeks ago, University of Michigan North campus. First one ive ever seen in my life it was size of dang Crow

Just saw this pop up on my feet and I'm excited for the listen. I live on Oahu in many of the birds here that I hear up in the mountains don't populate on the app. I've downloaded a whole bunch of different packs but nothing seems to work. But it's a great app regardless

Outstanding broadcast hi from Syracuse NY brother and everyone else and I will go hunting and anything else with you and your friends

❤

Great episode! One point though - I'd be terrified of using eBird or any other shared app. on privately owned land that housed endangered species. USFW can check that data just as easy as some bird researcher.

Can't talk fav birds without mentioning Loons

If they ask for a single state, Hawaii and Alaska seem like the only two places isolated enough to be options.

1:12:55

Its fun to mimic calls and try to get the app to recognize it. Turkey is useful lol

Why did ebird get rid of the snowy owl locator?

what?you were in eastern ks.when and where was this? if you are going to be near Topeka drop me a line.will buy you a beverage.

Earlier! hahaha. I love it!!!!

Pintails???

Orange shirt must of had to pinch off a growler because when he came back that ole boy was sweatin and hair was a mess

Neat app, but doesn't recognize my chickens. 😄

I'm glad these guys don't get into politics, at the same time though. Im pretty sure they're left off the center, I just hope they see the threats that the left are posing to us now. Which is really sad

I knew that guys only job was in academia when he starts relating everything to climate change and talks about things being "inclusive"

Great guests to have on. One thing that kinda doesnt stay coherent for me is the climate change argument when discussing wildlife dispersal. I find it very hard to wrap my head around scientists having concrete data for populations, ranges, and behaviors over the last few hundred years to monitor patterns for populations, ranges, and behaviors to claim a basline to make observations from to declare noticable changes, their causes, the animals' reactions to specific stimuli, and then declare that a changing climate is what caused it. They don't know. We have a jar's worth of marbles from the swimming pool sized basin of them called time+data. Things do change over time, but looking at a snapshot of it and making declarations projected over hundreds of years from a few decades of data is foolish at best and downright ignorant at worst. We, as a species, didn't even know what a Polar Vortex was a decade ago and now we understand that it's been a natural occurrence for at least hundreds of years and nobody noticed. We don't fully understand what's going on yet. In the 70s it was a new Ice Age, then Acid Rain was going to kill us all, then Global Warming, and now Climate Change. They clearly didn't have a clue, and it's all the same institutions making the same claims with many of the same people involved. Having a mind for conservation is excellent, and I love that our culture is finally starting to care, but I think we're going about it the wrong way. Doomsday is nowhere near upon us, and the nonstop fearmongering since we were children (of which every single predicted event has been incorrect) is just plain ludicrous. Take Trumpeter Swans, Sandhill Cranes, Red-Breasted Grosbeaks, Barred Owls, Ravens (not crows), Great Horned Owls, Pileated Woodpeckers, and Nighthawks for example. I've lived in rural western WI my entire life and we had none of these around at any point in the year in my area. Not a one. Over thirty years pass and now swans are pushing me off favored fishing spots and trying to spook me off boat landings. Everyone claims the cranes are in big trouble, but they're leaping at my car when I drive by because they think I'm trying to attack them or something (pretty aggressive bird in my opinion), and I cant drive by a single field without seeing at least one pair of them. The Grosbeaks are literally pushing other birds off the feeders, and I had never even seen one for the first 25 years of my life. Now they're everywhere for what seems like an entire season. The owls are nuts now. It sounds like a jungle in the spring and it's so bad for a few weeks with the caterwauling you need earplugs to sleep because there's more than four pairs shacking up in a 20 acre zone. Ravens. We actually have ravens now. I used to see crows all the time, and now I hardly see any. But Ravens are everywhere. That's weird to me. What strikes me as "off" is warm weather species and cold weather species are overlapping where I am now when we had none before, and if it's "all getting warmer" why are the cold weather species coming further south? And that's just birds I'm discussing right now. That pattern is for the mammals too. This does not add up. The point is that it's all way more complex than just dropping the term "climate change" like that offers any sensible explanation because for that claim to hold up you have to be able to prove you know where these birds are supposed to be, what average temperature it's supposed to be, what seasonal patterns there are supposed to be, what the population is supposed to be, what the range is supposed to be, and what they're supposed to be doing. If all that was provable there'd be no debate.

First comment

This lady studies ornithology at Buffalo wild wings 😂

Someone from ithaca just had to slide the climate change bs in there. Shocker.

Absolute snooze-fest!

It is hilarious to me to watch science split all of these animals into different distinct species based on looks language and everything else but want to tell all humans we are all the same thing is retarded lol