What is #TenMinMerlin?

winnics1
Apr 28
4 min read

*Yellow-rumped Warbler ("Butterbutt") in an urban Columbus (Ohio, USA) park, April 2025*

Growing up as a young birder, I knew that I could go to a few magical parks to see migrating birds, like brilliant colorful warblers. I would beg my parents to drive me two hours to Magee Marsh in Northwest Ohio to see the birds with thousands of my fellow birders, but obviously we could not go very often. It was only once I started getting better at birding that I realized that those very same birds were also passing through our yard and our local parks too. If I knew how to listen for them and spot them, I could even find them in bushes on campus or in the middle of large cities as they winged their way between their southern wintering grounds and their northern breeding grounds.

I want to help people realize that these gorgeous birds are sharing our neighborhoods every year. Noticing them fills me with awe, peace, and joy every year; something I think we all need lately. Scientific research shows that watching birds can help calm our central nervous system, even if we do not know the birds’ names or biology (link to an Audubon article about the health benefits of birding: https://www.audubon.org/magazine/birding-benefits-how-nature-improves-our-mental-mindsets).

Convincing people to notice their local birds has the potential to help birds too. When we recognize that birds use our neighborhoods, we can be inspired to make our neighborhoods more safe and welcoming for birds (link to an Audubon article about making yards bird-friendly: https://www.audubon.org/news/how-make-your-yard-bird-friendly-0). These amazing birds often migrate at night; their sensory systems are adapted to use starlight to navigate, so they can get disoriented by human-produced lights, drawing them into our neighborhoods were they are vulnerable to deadly encounters with outdoor cats and windows (tips for reducing window collisions: https://www.audubon.org/news/reducing-collisions-glass). Connecting people with local nature can help save birds as well!

I try to always be encouraging folks to try noticing their local birds, but in the spring I also run an outreach campaign called #TenMinMerlin (ten minute Merlin). Merlin is a free app produced by scientists at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology. It guides users through the steps of bird identification (start with location, habitat, size, behavior, etc.) but also has tools built from user-generated data that use an algorithm to identify bird species from photos and audio recordings. It is a great tool to help people learn more about their local birds! Link to the Merlin site: https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

What is #TenMinMerlin? Every morning, I put my phone on the windowsill as I get ready for work, letting Merlin’s SoundID feature record the birds singing in my yard for ten minutes. I start in March and do it every day through May to see how my backyard birds change as the winter residents head north and the spring migrants pass through from the south. Then I share the birds that Merlin detects online every day and encourage others to do the same. Why? Because spring migration is magical, but most people do not notice the birds as they pass through. If those birds are vocalizing nearby during that ten minute window, Merlin can let people know that the birds are around, giving people the opportunity to look out for interesting species in the yard. If users want help identifying the birds that they then see, Merlin has the tools for that too. While you can enjoy birds without ever knowing their names, knowing the species can help you spot the bird and learn more about them!

Merlin is a machine-learning (“AI”) algorithm; it is not infallible, especially for hard-to-distinguish bird songs, mimics that sing other species’ songs, and areas with a lot of noise interference. After you “end” the recording in SoundID, you have the option to replay it, jumping to the sections where Merlin detected a particular species. I use this option to double-check unexpected detections, because I know enough of my local birds’ vocalizations to be able to detect when Merlin was wrong. Not all #TenMinMerlin participants can do this and that is okay! I try to share when detections were incorrect, to remind people that while these tools are very useful they are not perfect.

#TenMinMerlin is not formally affiliated with the Merlin app or Cornell in any way, but I’m guessing they do not mind that more people learn about their useful tool through this campaign. It is also not directly related to my research work, but I firmly believe that the more people we get noticing their local birds the better it will be for birds and ornithologists alike.

Bar graph showing the date on the bottom x-axis, starting from 5 March 2025 until 25 April 2025. On the vertical y-axis is the number of species detected, so the height of the bars is the number of birds the free app Merlin heard and identified in my urban yard. The bars are colored orange for species that hadn't been detected this year, so the first bar is all orange, but each bar after that is mostly blue indicating they were birds previously detected. The number of birds detected ranges from 5 to 15 and I've detected 31 species total over six weeks, with many more to come as migration picks up (peak migration in Columbus Ohio USA starts ~3 May and runs for 2-3 weeks).

I also like to visualize the data I get from my #TenMinMerlin recordings by graphing the daily detections in the free open-source statistical platform R. I have written a tutorial for any #TenMinMerlin participants interested in graphing their data as well; you can find my instructions, templates, and R script in this Google Drive folder if you want to try it too: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gYwCgPQq6jQOfXtblt1R8_zMbh6qKu1S?usp=drive_link

So, give #TenMinMerlin a try! I’m having fun doing it (as an ornithologist who is always birding every day anyway) and some of my friends who have never looked at birds before in their life are enjoying it as well. Feel free to share the idea whenever you want, the more the merrier!