This app changed my life. I got into hiking and outdoor spaces when I married my wife and she wanted me to join her in camping, something I never did as a kid. This iteratively got me more into natural spaces and wildlife, but only as a passing curiosity.
But then one morning while camping, I woke up to a symphony of birdsong. Many calls, but there were at least dozens of a call echoing throughout the forest of a flute-like bird with a trill at the end. I was enchanted. I had used the Merlin app previously just to ID some city birds near my house, but I remembered I had it and found that dozens of wood thrushes were singing their song to me that morning. It's my favorite sound in the world, I've got a tattoo on my arm of the spectrogram of their song, and I make it a point to camp where I expect them to sing every year.
This created a journey into a love and personal involvement in the natural world that has changed me for the better.
Yeah I use it almost everyday. I've gotten to where I frequently recognize new birds. I don't talk about it much because I haven't fully come to terms with entering a bird watching phase of my life, but occasionally I'll say something like "Oh that Northern Flicker is back" and my wife will be totally confused. We live in Brooklyn near Prospect Park and have a backyard so we get a pretty wide range of birds.
