Invisible Birds

June 22, 2023

Here's something you didn't know five minutes ago: The graphic above is a picture of a Northern Cardinal singing its heart out in my backyard last week. Here, of course, you see not the bird's outside, but its inside—its soul, if you will. It comes to us courtesy of a miraculous free app called Merlin Bird ID, a gift from The Cornell Lab of Ornithology to anyone with a smartphone.

Merlin is simple and elegant. Download it. Open it. Register. Go outside. Hit "Sound ID," and the soundscape around you is transformed into something you can see as well as hear. The voiceprints flash onto your screen, the app names the singers, you click on them for more information. Suddenly seeing sound pushes you into a whole new plane of awareness. The invisible has just become visible, and your universe is never quite the same. 

Kids experience this kind of knowledge transformation constantly. Our mission as an adult in their orbits is to act as a tour guide to the world they don't yet know, connecting them to the new dimension they're stepping into, and putting names to those things. It's the same with adults, actually: Before we know something, it essentially is invisible to us. But once something jumps onto our radar (or sonar, in this case), a whole new dimension of the universe opens.

It's not surprising that I would find Merlin so gratifying, because its purpose mirrors our mission at KidsOutAndAbout.com: To make what's in your community's backyard visible to you and your family in a way it hasn't been before, and to celebrate all of the experiences people have created as well as what Nature provides. My job is to fill your summer with out-and-about experiences that sing, and to put those as close as the palm of your hand. When your friends ask how you know so much about what's happening, just answer, "A little birdie told me."

—Deb