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| Ovenbird |
I received an email yesterday from the Macauley Library at Cornell that amazed and delighted me. It said, in part, "Dear Marianne, This summer we released Sound ID in the Merlin Bird ID app, and we wanted to thank you for the part you played in this release. 3 of your recordings were used to train Merlin to identify bird sounds based on their spectrograms. Thank you for sharing your media! We could not have done it without your support."
Wow. I have this small and mostly pointless project of populating our home county's illustrated checklist on eBird with as many photos as possible, as well as a few sound recordings. With just a camera, and now thanks to Merlin's new bird sound recognition feature, my phone, to collect them, the quality is not great, as compared to the many dedicated folks who use real sound equipment. (Warning, some of the photos are really bad too, but you can generally ID the bird with them.)
Still, this has been fun for me, and a personal learning tool as well.
To know that a few of my amateur recordings were among the thousands used to train the AI was a really nice side benefit of my pretty much all-consuming hobby. And now I want to go out and record something.
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| Fledgling White-breasted Nuthatch |
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