E.E. Wilson Wildlife Area

one of many new benches along the trail

We took a trip this morning to go birding at E.E. Wilson Wildlife Management Area. This is the site of the former Camp Adair, a US Army Training Base from 1942 to 1945. Jeanette had suggested it several times recently as a place to go birding, and I was not that interested, but once again she had the right idea!  I checked eBird, and it has been ten years since we were last birding there. This nice new bench in the shade of an oak tree caught my attention right off, it's one of many improvements we spotted on our walk to the fishing pond.

 

Jeanette using Merlin to record and identify a singing bird

The real story of the day however, was our first experience with our iPhone using the Bird Song ID feature of the Merlin app.  It was amazing!  Jeanette is shown in the photo above recording a bird's song.  Almost instantaneously, Merlin identifies the bird and displays the name and image of the bird. This will truly be a transforming tool for anyone interested in identifying bird sounds. It allowed us to probably double the number of birds we were able to identify today.  You can see our eBird Observation List with photos by clicking here.