By Ben and Cheryl Coles
Here’s how we met Merlin
It was a beautiful spring morning in 2022 when Cheryl and I awoke in our trailer to the sound of a symphony of singing birds. This wasn’t the “caw, caw” of a raven or crow that annoyingly sits above the trailer at the crack of dawn. This was the sound of hundreds of songbirds in the trees just outside of our trailer. We were at Selkirk Provincial Park on the north shore of Lake Erie in Ontario, Canada.
The north shore of Lake Erie in the spring is a haven for birders. Provincial parks like Wheatley, Rondeau, Long Point, Selkirk and Rock Point make perfect resting places for songbirds flying north, needing a break after the long flight over Lake Erie. Cheryl and I have never been birders prior to this, but this place stirred something in us that took flight over the next few years.
I guess we are a little cliché, a couple getting into birding upon retirement. We used to hear birds as just background noise. I couldn’t tell you the sound of a bird beyond a robin.
Once we started moving through our 50s, we became empty nesters and began to travel more. We slowed down from a working life and bringing up kids to experiencing the simpler things in life. And let’s face it, birds are everywhere, making them an accessible form of nature to engage with in any outdoor space.
Our friend Jamie, who I’ve know since childhood and who, along with his wife Kelly, are
frequent camp mates of ours, learned of our new birding interest. He suggested we try a phone app that can identify birds through pictures and sound. The app is called Merlin Bird ID byCornell Lab or Merlin for short. It’s a free app created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. With it you can photograph a bird and it will identify the bird species. It can also identify birds through sounds, which is what really appealed to us.
Over the next couple of years, as we travelled around to dozens of provincial parks, national parks, conservation areas, state parks and more, we frequently brought out our phones to identify the birds that we could hear. We’d be on a hike and hear an interesting bird and we’d bring out Merlin to listen and tell us what kind of bird it is: “That’s a barn swallow” and “that’s a yellow-bellied sapsucker” and “that’s a gray catbird”. It was amazing!
Some people spend their whole lives studying so that they can identify birds by the sounds they make and now some dummy like me can just open an app on his phone and know instantly the type of bird making that sound.
Who knew how common a red-eyed vireo was in our part of Ontario? I’d never
even heard of the bird before, but it seems like every time I open the app there it is.
We didn’t become all out birders. Probably because I’m too cheap to invest in the expensive cameras and lenses. We became more like interested parties. We enjoyed hearing the song birds and finding out what they were, but it was more of a passive hobby.
In the spring of 2025, another camp mate and longtime friend, Steve asked us a simple question that took this birding thing to a whole new level for us. We were at Pinery Provincial Park and we heard and then saw a duck in a tree above Steve’s campsite. I brought out Merlin and turned on sound recording to identify the duck. Steve, who is a hunter, knew immediately it was a wood duck and that they are often found in trees. Steve then said “Is he a new lifer for you?” A new “lifer”? I had never heard that term before. I then learned through Merlin that a “new lifer” refers to the first time you see or hear and identify a specific species of bird, which you then add to your “Life List” in the Merlin app. This list serves as a personal record of all the different bird species you have identified throughout your life.
Cheryl and I both immediately set up our Life Lists and the competition began.
Over the course of the 2025 camping season, from the end of May to the end of October, Cheryl and I have been using Merlin on an almost daily basis. At our home, in the back yard, taking the dog for walks in the neighbourhood, at family and friend outdoor gatherings and camping trips, we competed to see who could get the most “lifers”.
The app is almost addicting. When you get a new “lifer” it does a little explosion of confetti on the phone screen, congratulating you for your achievement. We’ve encouraged all of our camping friends to start their Life Lists. It’s become a fun competition between us all. We’ll be sitting by a campfire and Cheryl will casually bring out her phone and set it on the table next to her, hoping that nobody noticed. She’s trying to ID a bird and raise her number of lifers so that she can be ahead. In short order somebody notices what she’s doing and then we’ll all be frantically trying to get our phones out and get Merlin going so that she doesn’t get a lifer that we don’t have. It’s become a fun part of camping for us. We’re always asking each other how many lifers they have.
As of the date of writing this article, I have 105 species of birds on my Life List. Cheryl is following closely behind with 95. I have some that she doesn’t have, and she has some that I don’t have.
As we plan our 2026 season, birding is coming in to play. We’d like to camp at some of the Lake Erie Parks in May because the birding in those parks is amazing and we haven’t experienced it since starting our Life Lists. We also plan on heading out west in Canada with the hopes of getting new lifers that we normally wouldn’t find in southern Ontario.
So yes, we are the cliché. As we are getting into our later 50s, birding has become a fun pastime for us. I’m okay with that cliché, and hope to find many more lifers in our camping
journeys.
Merlin is a free app that can be found on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.
Ben and Cheryl have a column in each of the RV Lifestyle Magazine issues and on the website at www.rvlifemag.com, but they have so much more to share with readers – please take a few minutes to visit their website at www.campingwiththecoles.ca
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