Countryside living. Getting on a bit. It was only a matter of time before I gave into certain impulses: I’m curious about birdlife. It’s a curiosity that’s at risk of developing into outright ...

Birding is a popular pastime for people of all ages. According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, more than 45 million people enjoy watching birds. It’s a hobby you can pick up at any time, it’s ...

I first discovered Merlin Bird ID by Cornell Lab of Ornithology earlier this summer, when I was trying to figure out the identity of a particular bird of prey in my neighborhood. After looking at a ...

In between snowstorms lately, we’ve been able to enjoy the sounds of spring as our feathered friends wing north again for summer. Everyone knows the sound of a Canada goose honking and probably a ...

It’s spring, and nature is pulling me away from my computer as I write this. The sun is shining, the world is warming up, and the birds are chirping away. And that got me thinking: What if a ...

Scientific evidence suggests dinosaurs met their extinction through asteroid impact. Today, if a species goes extinct, chances we as humans had something to do with it. In this century alone, we've ...

Merlin was on the job at Westwood Hills Nature Center in St. Louis Park one recent day, helping birders identify bird songs. Not Merlin the storied magician, although what was happening could be ...

I’m not a bird watcher, but I’ve become a bird listener ever since downloading a bionic ear app to my phone. It lets me enter a different world, one where I’m surrounded not just by chirping but by ...

Next to insects, birds sadly seem to get short shrift from humans. We remain powerfully drawn to scenes of lions hunting in the Kalahari desert or rhinos jousting in eastern India, but remain mostly ...

CORNELL LAB Merlin, developed by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology in 2017, works in conjunction with its other app, eBird, which gathers and stores bird sightings from hoi polloi birders worldwide. Like ...

Is that the tweet of a titmouse? Or the chirp of a chickadee? After you download the Merlin Bird ID app, you can use your smartphone to identify sounds and match them to the birds in trees nearby and ...