Sitting in a garden & listening to birds ... with Merlin

Good morning, DMV! It’s Wednesday, May 6.

For years, when out on family hikes and strolls, my husband would break out the Merlin Bird ID app on his phone to identify birds. I finally downloaded it and tried it out: magical.

I was on the National Mall yesterday and visited the Enid A. Haupt Garden by the Smithsonian Castle and the Asian and African art museums. Human noise — traffic, construction, machinery — hummed and thrummed nearby. Nonetheless, this little oasis was filled with birdsong. I switched on my Merlin app and listened as the app on my phone recorded.

In three minutes, the app suggested these birds were around me: blue jay, Baltimore oriole, tufted titmouse (which is adorable!), northern cardinal, northern mockingbird, American robin, house sparrow and European starling.

It also created a spectrogram — a visual representation — of the sound I captured with the app.

All of this reminded me of one of my all-time favorite works of art: “The Great Animal Orchestra,” a collaborative piece by soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause and London-based studio United Visual Artists (UVA). I saw it about 10 years ago in Paris at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.

In a dark room, people sat and lay on the floor, listening to Krause’s recordings of animals in their habitats in the Amazon, Africa and North America. On the walls was a scrolling visual representation of these sounds. You can get a feel for it in this video, starting at the 4:30 timestamp.

While poking around last night to read more about the Great Animal Orchestra, I stumbled upon this interactive website. Take the time to click through it. Listen to Krause talk about his recordings. The chapter on “Acoustic Niches” in Zimbabwe is glorious. The one on “Sound Degradation” in California is damning. You can also listen to samples of his recordings and purchase them here.

I think of the animal orchestra often. I dream of this show coming to a museum near us. (Please, DMV, make it happen!)

These animal sounds are increasingly being drowned out and overtaken by human noise. Our birds are vanishing.

Using the Merlin app brought all of this to mind and gave me a moment to listen closely to the birds still with us.

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Warm-weather fun is ramping up. There is so much going on this weekend. Here’s a handful of events, all on Saturday:

Alexi Maravel, 55, a resident of Hingham, Massachusetts, captured this moment in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac during a trip to D.C. in mid-April.

“I spent the workweek in D.C., and I always look for good walks or runs around the DMV,” Alexi wrote in his submission.

“I had never seen the LBJ memorial park near the Pentagon, so I walked from my hotel in Crystal City to the park. Despite being next to the GW Parkway, I was struck at how quiet and peaceful the park is.”

Share your recent photos of life in the DMV here.

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