All my friends are getting into birding
- Emma Baker
- Jun 17
- 2 min read
Millenials are getting older. My friends and I are talking less about nights out and more about home repair, and, increasingly, birds. I partly credit the trend to the super popular Merlin app from Cornell Lab, which released in summer of 2021. Although iNaturalist also has sound identification, the Merlin app has been beautifully designed for use by birders specfically.
Gamification is a familiar concept for millennials like me, but nowhere does it feel more wholesome and pleasant than on a walk with the Merlin app, discovering the surprising diversity of birds in even suburban or urban environments.
Even in fragmented ecosystems that have been chopped up into parking lot, strip mall, subdivision, and waste land, birds can fly in. Whether they migrate across these lifeless deserts, or can forage for a few moths tinkling into fluorescent streetlights, birds can be found in the most forsaken places.
Taking a slow, thoughtful moment to listen to the world feels like a luxury. Free spaces that are open to every member of a community, like nature reserves, feel like relics of a better time. Places we can just exist, and maybe make a little game out of identifying birds, feel like an oasis.
Seeing these fellow travelers, these singing representatives of the connected Earth, feels like one little band-aid on the wound of our relationship with nature. Merlin making that into a fun game gives me hope that more people of my generation are opening their ears and eyes to the wild world.
Merlin birding app. https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh. https://www.rbge.org.uk/
