Date: 4/18/26 7:14 pm From: Chuq Von Rospach via Tweeters <tweeters...> Subject: Re: [Tweeters] Beware the Chipping Sparrow
On Apr 18, 2026 at 18:09:33, Dennis Paulson via Tweeters <
<tweeters...> wrote:
> I’ll add to what Carol said. I have been seeing this rash of Chipping
> Sparrow reports by sound, and indeed it seems that Merlin does confuse
> juncos and Chipping Sparrows with some frequency. And of course this isn’t
> the only error that Merlin makes. I understood that the main reason for
> developing Merlin was so that people could learn bird sounds more readily,
> but it seems that it is used primarily for adding to eBird lists.
>
> It seems appropriate that any time Merlin reports an unexpected bird, if
> at all possible that bird should be confirmed with your own eyes or your
> own knowledge of bird vocalizations.
>
I recently ran into this — I started getting repeated hits for a Chipping
Sparrow near where the Port Gamble Harris’ Sparrow is hanging out. I ended
up not logging it into eBird but adding it to the comments after 20 minutes
of trying to get eyes on it. (Hint: that location is full of crowned
sparrows and juncos, too).
My general take on Merlin these days after too many hours of diving into
it’s reliability and consistency (for reasons that don’t matter here) is
that if eBird notes the bird as orange dot or red dot, Merlin is not “good
enough” to warrant logging it. Note that Merlin also uses red and orange
dots and they do NOT always line up with eBird: I trust eBird here when
they differ.
Something I wish Merlin would do is available with the Haiku bird ID system
(which I have experimented with and recommend with limitations, but which,
being an unattended device, should not be used to add eBird data) — Haiku
includes a confidence level (high/medium/low) on its IDs. If Merllin did
this, it and eBird could work together to set a policy to accept high
confidence IDs but not lower confidence ones — and actually publicize the
policy in the apps.
This is a solvable problem if eBird and Merlin choose to.
Haiku, FWIW, uses BIRDnet as its data source, as do some of the other
similar systems like Birdweather.
Chuq
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Chuq Von Rospach (http://www.chuq.me)
Silverdale, Washington
Birder, Nature and Wildlife Photographer
