Six Things – Volume 16

Merlin | hummingbirds | uncomfortable | tube maps | sculpture | space elevator

Apr 21, 2023

Thing 1 – Merlin

“Oh, you must try Merlin. It’s amazing!”

“I love Merlin!”

“I don’t know how I managed without Merlin!”

There comes a time, when people are raving about something, when you decide that you’re never going to succumb. You hold out, a lone voice of sanity in a world gone mad, and wait for the nonsense to die down.

It worked with 24 all those years ago, and it’s working, so far, with Succession.

Merlin is different.

For the uninitiated, Merlin is a birding app developed by Cornell University. In their words, “identify the birds you see or hear with Merlin Bird ID.”

“Yeah yeah yeah, whatever,” I thought privately (and now not so privately). “If you love Merlin so much why don’t you marry it?”

A large part of this reaction, I admit, is defensiveness. I’ve devoted a fair amount of time over the last few years evangelising about the joys of learning to recognise the songs of birds for yourself, the key tools used in this endeavour being online recordings and lots of practice. There are no shortcuts to learning birdsong – you just bally well have to knuckle down. The last thing I wanted was some newfangled technology making me (in that small niche of my existence, at any rate) redundant.

Turns out there are shortcuts. Or, at the very least, learning aids.

In the end I decided I had to try it. I slightly – only very slightly, mind – wanted it not to work, so I could report back with a partially regretful “oh dear, what a shame, never mind.”

Very mean-spirited of me, I know.

So it is with not a little sheepishness that I report that Merlin is excellent. Actually, not just excellent. Bloody marvellous.

Shall I start with the negatives? Yes. My ego demands it.

Merlin struggles with a few things. It doesn’t like wind much. It doesn’t like faraway birds much. It doesn’t especially like it when they all sing together (although it likes it more than I thought it would). And it has a funny blind spot with certain vocalisations of the Carrion Crow. The West Norwood Carrion Crows, at least.

It failed to recognise (or maybe just didn’t hear) quite a few that were distant, and that an experienced birdlistener would pick up instantly. And just once, when five species were going off all at once, it had a mild hissy fit and refused to recognise the existence of any of them.

But that’s about it, really. It recognised a lot of birds from scant information – just a cheep here or a tsip there. And it sorted out a goldfinch and a blackcap singing simultaneously – I only realised the goldfinch was singing when the blackcap stopped.

For anyone who is interested in birds, wants to learn more about them, and in particular wants help with recognising them by their songs, I recommend it wholeheartedly. And it works, by the way, anywhere in the world.

Here comes the caveat.

I think Merlin works best as an aid to learning. Ideally, you’ll take a bit of time after each session – you can have it listening all the time as you walk – to listen back and build on whatever knowledge you already have. And it does help (although it’s not essential) if you have a little knowledge and are prepared to use your critical faculties when examining the results. Was that really a Common Sandpiper (a small wader and habitué of hill streams, reservoirs, lakes and gravel pits) lurking in the bushes at West Norwood Cemetery? I think not. Did a Lapwing (another wader, known mostly on farmland) grace me with its presence in distinctly un-farmy Regent’s Park on Wednesday? With the best will in the world, no, it did not.

But these are the most minor of complaints.

I would even go so far as to say this: if you have no interest in birds or birdsong (in which case you might not even have read this far), download it and give it a go. You might just enjoy it.

Get it. Use it. Have fun. And tell me what you hear.

There’s a demo of Merlin here.

Thing 2 – hummingbirds

I have become far too invested in the progress of two tiny birds half a world away. Olive, a female Allen’s Hummingbird in California, laid a clutch of two eggs back in March, the chicks (named Lily and River by their online fans) hatched two weeks later, and I’ve been intermittently watching them grow ever since.

It’s a weirdly intimate thing, to spy on the process. Moving, too. As I say, I’m far too invested in them. I could go on about it, but I’ll just share this clip of Lily and River being fed. It is surprisingly – eye-wateringly, you might say – violent, and the first time I saw it I was, frankly, terrified for them.

And now Lily and River are all feathery and yesterday they started trying out their wings and Lily stood on the edge of the nest so River scooted over to the middle of the nest so Lily couldn’t get back in and –

I’ll shut up.

You can watch them here. You might just see their first flight.

I wrote about hummingbirds in Six Things – Volume 7.

Reginald Perrin, one of the great tragicomic creations of the 20th century, had an idea. He would open a shop. He would call it Grot. It would sell only useless things. It was the retail equivalent of Springtime For Hitler – an idea so terrible it was bound to fail.

And of course it did nothing but. People loved Grot. They gave Reggie’s son-in-law Tom’s undrinkable wine to people they hated, whiled away happy evenings working out how to play the incomplete board game with no rules, displayed the ghastly pottery as groundbreaking works of art.

The Uncomfortable is not like Grot, in that I don’t think Katerina Kamprani wants it to fail – but it does remind me of it. Things made deliberately to be uncomfortable. I like the idea. It’s deliciously perverse.

Thanks to Jason Hazeley for putting me on to it.

Thing 4 – tube maps

Regular readers will know I’m partial to a map. These alternative subway maps (the work of Max Roberts) are just the kind of thing that people, like me, who like this kind of thing will like. I think the multilinear one is my favourite.

Thanks to Chris Coates for pointing me towards them. Do follow Chris’s alter ego Odd This Day on Twitter (if you still do Twitter) for a daily dose of oddness.

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Thing 5 – sculpture

“I have to work between my heartbeats, because if I don’t, the pulse in my finger will cause problems.”

It’s always interesting to watch people doing things extremely well, and I find it especially entrancing when they’re doing something I could never do myself in a million years. This is a lovely short film about the man who makes the smallest sculptures in the world.