No, not the wizard. I’m not much into sword and sorcery, although I loved Excalibur and especially its Merlin. But no, this is the free app from Cornell which is amazing and, so far, totally free of ads, promotions, and other junk. It can identify birds by photo or sound. I turned it on for exactly one minute and this is what I get. These are all the different birds I could hear. When each sounds its background turns yellow. New birds come on the list as they get detected.
This was how I discovered I had two types of crows in my neighborhood. It was amazing I hadn’t realized this before. But here’s at least a partial explanation. First, fish crows and American crows look almost identical.
The American Crow on the right is usually a little larger and the fish crow supposedly has a shaggier look and a slightly more slender beak.
Second, who would have thought a fish crow would be in suburban Atlanta, far from large lakes or rivers (we do have a large pond called a “lake” nearby). Apparently fish crows have been moving inland from the Atlantic coast specializing in waste from fast food restaurants. So likely the bountiful feedings I provide the crows are an extension of their dumpster diving.
The two birds look almost identical, but they sound very different. As soon as my wife showed me the app, it picked up two types of crows. The American Crow is the one that makes variations of the familiar “caw” sound. The fish crow sounds like “uh-huh” or “huh-huh.” Apparently there are at least two groups of crows frequenting my house, although it isn’t uncommon to hear both vocalizations at the same time as the Merlin app shows. The groups seem to tolerate each other, but I have seen occasional squabbling among the crows which I now wonder might have been between the two species.
The Merlin app also does photos identification, but in my experience unless you’re really set up for it, it’s hard to get decent bird photos. The subject is skittish and usually won’t let you get near. However, occasionally I spot a bird I really want to get on camera.
Excuse the blurriness. It had to be enlarged to be able to see anything. This was taken this winter in suburban Atlanta. From searching the best I came up with was the golden-fronted woodpecker for an identification. I ran it through two free online bird identification programs and they rated it 70-80% chance it was the golden-fronted woodpecker. The problem is that the golden-fronted woodpecker is native to Northern Mexico and small parts of southern Texas. So what would it be doing in suburban Atlanta in the winter.
I ran the image through Merlin and it couldn’t identify it.
Broad Speculations 
Wow, I know I’ll enjoy that app! And my wife will too. The bird sounds outside our home in inland San Diego is constant. It will be nice to see who is actually making all these sounds. And it’s good to hear that this particular app works well. I once tried an app for identifying plants from my phone camera, though it didn’t seem very accurate.
(Also I’d love it if I could use my phone to match paint color formulas, though I don’t think they quite have the technology down for that yet. The apps I’ve seen only suggest similar stock colors. So I instead must bring a sample of what I want matched into a paint store for them to do what my phone should some day be able to do.)
LikeLiked by 2 people
I use PlantNet and find it generally okay, but certainly plants are much harder than birds because of the larger number of species and diversity of similar species in the same genus. So, I sometimes get 3 or 4 species with similar certainty but often they are closely related in the genus.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I used Google Lens on your photo and it spit out this. No idea if it’s accurate.:
I always forget there are apps like Merlin out there. I wonder if there’s anything for other random animal noises.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Eric was complaining some posting issues and I happened to find your post in pending for some bizarre reason. I never saw any notification of an issue. Maybe WP didn’t like numbered links or something.
LikeLiked by 1 person
As far as I can tell the “yellow-shafted” variant of the Northern flicker still have the red on the back of the head. My best guess is Merlin took account of my location and decided it couldn’t be a Golden-front Woodpecker so it responded it didn’t know.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think you had 6 links and WP in my settings was set on default which appears to only allow three. I thought I had upped this years ago but maybe the setting got lost in some conversion. I still should have been notified but conceivably that notification went to a Spam folder. A real Comedy of Technology Errors. I have upped the number (again) but may back it out if I get bombarded with spam.
LikeLiked by 1 person
No worries. I didn’t even think about all those links I ended up copying and pasting.
I think I raised mine years ago, but it did lead to more spam so I ended up moving it back to 3. (The default, IIRC, is 2, in other words, 2 or more links gets you moderated.) Of course, that only works if it’s reliable in sending the notices. If that’s now being spotty… Sometimes I wonder if WP realizes that Substack is competing with them.
LikeLiked by 1 person