[wenderen]

Caution for folks learning about the Merlin app from this thread: it's good at identifying bird calls, especially in North America, where there's a lot of training data, but it's not conclusive and can sometimes lead you astray by misidentifying a common bird as something exotic, or getting confused by birds that mimic other species (like mockingbirds). Treat Merlin Sound ID's suggestions as just suggestions, and use multiple inputs to identify a bird - appearance, structure, plumage, time of year, time of day, behavior, habitat for example.

[joshuahedlund]

Yes, solid advice. Generally I find if I'm fairly close to the sound source, and it's repeating, it's almost always accurate, to a surprising degree (when I can confirm by sighting it); if it's a one-off call from farther away, especially of a rarer bird, it's often not. Merlin helps by printing a red circle next to rare candidates for your time/location, and I've learned to treat those with suspicion. I've definitely seen it get confused - once it kept pegging a Mallard when I was nowhere near water, and I finally figured out it was interpreting the jostling sound of lens caps in my bag as I walked that apparently resembled a quack!

[CoffeeOnWrite]

Would you say more about mockingbirds? Does Merlin tend to output mockingbird when it’s really a bird that a mockingbird imitates, or output a non-mockingbird when it’s actually a mockingbird imitating that non-mockingbird? (I found an amazing-sounding bird and downloaded Merlin on the spot to id it, and it output mockingbird, that’s why I am especially curious. It was a dark night so I could not visually id at all)

[wenderen]

Merlin's pretty at good at identifying mockingbirds by sound alone but once in a while it outputs a bird that's not even expected in your area. It rarely makes the reverse error (identifying the call of a non-mockingbird as the call of a mockingbird) in my experience!

[dtgriscom]

... but what if I want to think there's an exotic visitor to my back yard?

[gs17]

BirdNET seems to handle mockingbirds pretty well in my experience. I've tried it a few times when I know what they're mimicking, and it popped up as a mockingbird.