The Cloisters, we figured, were up there somewhere, though we weren’t totally sure where. Intermittently, as we walked, we could see part of a granite tower, and the Cloisters had a granite tower, but what if it was a different granite tower? Manhattan is a big place. Who knows how many granite towers there are?
We took the risk and started up the hill on a path that seemed to be going in the right direction, and after a while we did pass a sign telling us we were on the route to the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s satellite museum of medieval art and architecture. I suppressed the urge to find a way to move the sign to the bottom of the hill, where it would have been more useful.
It was a gorgeous spring day. Blue skies, light winds, minimal sirens and helicopter traffic. It was perhaps a little crisp, which made my wife and me happy, considering what the next few months would be like in the Keys. Our friend Alicia, who lives in New York and was coming out of a long winter, was a little less invigorated.
I was in a citified mood, not really thinking about nature other than noticing how much green there was in the middle of such an urban area. And then I noticed I was hearing a bird sing a really loud song.
If I’d been out by myself I would have stopped and spent some time trying to suss it out. But I flashed back to this very cold day years ago when my wife and I were walking through a park in England. I stopped and spent 15 minutes going back and forth between my binoculars and my field guide, trying to figure out what bird I was looking at.
It turned out to be a Eurasian robin, which inspired my shivering wife to say, “Great, you’ve identified the most common bird in England. Can we go now?”
And, well, this wasn’t a birding trip. And she had been wanting to go to the Cloisters for as long as I’ve known her. And it really would have been bad form to let my interests torture her the way I had in England. Not to mention Alicia, who had made no vows at all to put up with that kind of truck.
Also, I didn’t have binoculars with me. And the canopy was much taller and more shadowy than anything in the Keys. So if I did catch sight of the songster’s motion, I might be able to get to warbler or sparrow or thrush, but I probably wouldn’t have been able to discern his finer field marks and get to species.
I did have my camera, but in the interest of traveling light I only had a pair of light, short lenses in my bag.
One of the limiting things about being a birdwatcher in the Keys is that we don’t get a lot of birdsong. In other places, people get to experience the wonders of the dawn chorus, but it doesn’t really happen here. Northern mockingbirds sing. As do prairie warblers and northern cardinals. Common grackles and gray kingbirds make noises, but to my mind they are too ratchet to count as songs. Sometimes out in the backcountry, if you are lucky, you might hear a yellow warbler. White-crowned pigeons, mourning doves, Eurasian collared doves and common ground-doves all make various cooing noises, but they tend to be more underscoring than vibrant.
And I can’t really think of much else that adds to our soundscape.
If I lived in the northeast, or had spent more time birding there in the spring, I might have known what I was hearing. But I’ve never been one who can sit around listening to recordings of birds and then remember what they were when I heard them days, months or even years later. I need to hear it in the field, usually multiple times, before I can recognize a bird’s song.
All of which means, walking up that path, listening to those fast-paced melodies, I was officially befuddled. Not my favorite place to be.
Which is when I remembered Merlin.
Merlin, of course, was a mythical wizard who lived in England – or technically the island that became England – during the medieval period. Despite our destination, that is not who I was thinking about. And I wasn’t thinking about the small-but-feisty falcon called the Merlin, which I thought was named after the wizard when I began typing this sentence, but whose name turns out to be a homophone, an identical word with a totally different meaning and etymology.
The Merlin I was thinking about was an app that was named after the bird but not the wizard, even though it has abilities that would seem like sorcery to the medieval mind.
The app created by the folks at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is designed to help birders figure out what they were seeing in the field.
Honestly, there is a bit of a stigma in the bird world for people who rely too heavily on Merlin for IDs. Especially when they use photos, because with so many variables – camera angle, lighting, images shot on phone cameras with limited magnification, and changeable bird postures among them – the app is often wrong. Which is fine. The app is designed to lead you in the right direction, not to be definitive and not to replace your critical thinking skills. (The problem usually comes from inexperienced birders who take the app’s IDs as gospel and report rare birds, and then get mad when more experienced birds try to correct them.)
Merlin has a better track record with bird calls, though, where there are fewer variables and subtleties. (Interestingly, as I understand it, the app creates a sonogram of the bird’s song that comes through the mic, then does image search to compare it with other sonograms to make the ID.)
I hit the record button on the phone and watched the sonogram play out like a more scrawly EKG.
Nan and Alicia had stopped just up the path to wait for me.
Please please please don’t be an American robin, the most common bird in the northeast, I thought.
The sonogram showed a lot of minimal bumps from a city’s ambient noises, then a bunch of spikes and dips when the bird began to sing again.
Merlin said it was a black-throated green warbler. I’d actually seen one in migration a few days before at Fort Zach. And it seemed pretty logical that that was what I was hearing, as New York was well within their breeding territory. So I believed it and felt my befuddlement begin to ease.
I put my phone back in my pocket and hurried to catch up.
