THE MERLIN BIRD ID APP
Hearing a warble you don’t recognize? Allow this pocket-size ornithologist to sort it out
One of the things that most surprises visitors to London is the preponderance in recent years of large, aggressive, bright-green parakeets—often dozens of them flocking together. You can go weeks without seeing an old-fashioned sparrow or a blackbird, but you see and hear these invasive Himalayan—or possibly African—imports every day, even in the winter.
How parakeets came to be thriving in London is not known for sure. The best guess has always been that in the late 1960s, when they were first found breeding, south of London in Kent, they had escaped from aviaries.
New evidence published by The Times of London just this week suggests, however, that London’s squawking parakeet population has been around for more than 200 years and goes back to pets that escaped from homes and animal dealers. It’s only in the past 30 years, with warmer winters, that the beak count has increased exponentially.
The urban myths about the birds’ origin are more entertaining: that Jimmy Hendrix once released a pair on Carnaby Street is one such. Another is that, in 1951, some escaped from the set near Heathrow Airport of the Humphrey Bogart film The African Queen.
As a predominantly urban creature, I have never been hugely interested in birds. The parakeets thing, though, is quite a curiosity. The mysteries of migration, especially of the birds that fly nonstop for thousands of miles with G.P.S. accuracy, are interesting. The birds that fly for up to 10 months without landing are borderline amazing. The fact that birds are not just related to dinosaurs but actually are dinosaurs is intriguing and slightly spooky. But that’s as far as my interest typically extends.
However, I have become slightly obsessed this summer with Merlin, a free bird-identification app developed by Cornell University’s ornithology laboratory.
The app works offline—important if you are in the wild—and can identify bird species by listening to their song or analyzing a photo. The song feature, which I have used extensively, is remarkable. Even when there is background noise, it can pick up a faint tweeting and identify it with seeming accuracy.
I say that with confidence because after Merlin told me—while I was playing with the app in a Canadian forest—that I was listening to a western tanager and showed a picture and key facts about the bird, I then saw it—bright yellow with a black back and a red head. Having never heard of a western tanager, I was rather thrilled, both about spotting the little guy and the tech involved in identifying him.
Other birds I identified in the United States and Canada included chestnut-backed chickadees, yellow-rumped warblers, dark-eyed juncos, red-breasted nuthatches, warbling vireos, and, best of all, bald eagles, whose chirruping is surprisingly meek.
Back in my garden, where the app tells me there are 138 possible birds to spot, I was able to quickly identify a European robin who hangs out there all the time, Eurasian blue tits, Eurasian wrens, common chiffchaffs, and, naturally, the ubiquitous rose-ringed parakeets.
It’s great fun and surprisingly satisfying, although I’m not sure I’m likely to become addicted.
The Status Audio Pro X Earbuds
A pair of earbuds that will blow your AirPods out of the water
It’s been almost two years since I proclaimed the Between 3ANC earbuds, from a niche Brooklyn maker, Status Audio, as my all-time favorite in-ear headphones.
Now Status, founded and led in Williamsburg by former jazz musician James Bertuzzi, has an even better version.
The new Pro X model, for which Status Audio is now taking orders for September delivery, is beyond superb. The original, which I’ve been using for two years, delivers a huge sound, but it sometimes gets a bit raw. Its massive bass can get fractionally muffled in extremis.
The Pro X, although 20 percent smaller, gets bass to perfection, while extending the sharper end of the sound. With good-quality tracks, it is simply beguiling, although the concomitant effect is that it makes so-so recordings sound poorer than they would on lesser earbuds.
Like its predecessor, the Pro X puts three drivers—miniature speakers—in each ear. But the technology at the heart of the drivers, the balanced armatures, now comes from an 80-year-old world leader in microphones, Knowles Electronics, in Illinois.
In the Status app, as with the Between 3ANC, you can select equalizer settings, but now there’s a new one—Knowles Preferred. I don’t think I’ve ever heard such rich, heavy bass combined with precision highs. I just love this sound.
Try it for yourself with the track I’ve been listening to again and again: “California Soil,” by the British band London Grammar. Ideally, you’ll stream it from Tidal in the highest quality, Max, which uses the HiRes FLAC format.
One thing Status still hasn’t gotten quite right is noise cancellation, which is still rather modest. I really don’t care, though, because if I’m looking to use headphones to blank out sound, over-ear cans are by far the best, especially the super-comfortable Sonos Ace.
Another shout-out for Status—its app and Bluetooth pairing are both just terrific. The Pro X can even run on two devices simultaneously, which is useful and unusual.
GTech Multi MK2 Cordless Handheld Vacuum
A vacuum that will make you look forward to your daily tidying up
The question I get asked most about personal tech is “What’s your favorite gadget?” I never know what to answer because there are so many. But as for which device I use the most, beyond the obvious—iPhone, laptop, smartwatch—there’s one that the makers would probably be happy for me to call boring but important.
Gtech is a new and rapidly growing British vacuum-cleaner maker that’s ramping up its presence in the U.S.
Not a lot of people know that the U.K. is a huge producer of vacuums, from fancy and expensive Dysons to the cheap, cheerful, efficient, and robust Henry range, by Numatic International, which every professional cleaner you speak to in Britain prefers to anything else. Henrys are available in the U.S., but they’re not common.
But the thing I’ve always wanted is a mini, handheld cordless vacuum, for sucking up spills; dealing with crumbs in the car; de-fanging spidery corners of the garden shed, where I write; and more. People also love them for de-furring their dog, although Bob, Landing Gear’s resident cat, is strangely resistant to being vacuumed.
Dyson makes a reportedly good little Car+Boat handheld, but it costs nearly $300, and they don’t respond to e-mail inquiries, so I haven’t been able to try one.
So when Gtech offered their $170 Multi MK2 for trial, I sucked it up. It comes with a set of tools, and it’s simple, sturdy, well designed, and does what it promises. I use it for at least a minute or so almost every day—enough to make it at least among my favorite gadgets. It’s not spectacular in any way, but it’s incredibly useful.
The HP Envy 6155e Printer
A printer that is particularly useful in a tight spot
While we’re talking boring but important, this printer is unusual and solved a problem for me this summer. I should take the chance to say that I’m not fond of HP for the way they waged legal war on the British billionaire Mike Lynch in the 12 years leading up to his court acquittal, and then death, last year. I knew Lynch and liked him. He would have gone on to be a huge asset to science and humanity in general.
Printers, anyway, are the most troublesome of modern electronics, and are one of the more expensive to maintain because of the insanely high cost of ink, which is regularly calculated to be pricier by volume than Chanel No. 5 perfume.
My last printer, a re-fillable Epson EcoTank model, was cheaper to maintain but awful in every other way, and also enormous, so I gave it away.
The plan then was to find something that would fit unobtrusively in a specific closet. This required extreme compactness, with the paper tray stowed neatly inside the printer, and with the long side of the paper across the width of the machine—a relatively uncommon design.
The HP Envy 6155e—surely the stupidest product name in history—was the only one I could find that could fit in the tight space I had, so I bought it.
And it’s been … well, O.K. Though the setup is awful and still not complete, the thing works nicely, if slowly. When it doesn’t, the old standby of turning it off and on again does the trick. The print quality is excellent, and the design really is clever. The ink is ludicrously expensive, but HP has various deals to get the cost down. They are, I suspect, deliberately overcomplicated, but that’s another matter.
The best thing about the Envy is that it barely screws up. The next best: that it can’t be seen. For that reason, I am happy with it and recommend it.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
