Danang Bird Club News

This week's 'Letter from' is a letter from my old local patch of Brent River Park, in west London.  Brent River Park is a narrow, winding patchwork of wildflower and hay meadows, recreational parks, playing fields, golf courses and allotments in the west London borough of Ealing. It skirts 7 km of a shallow and unfortunately rather polluted river, covering 400 ha of green space in the Brent valley.  A trail called the  Brent River Path runs through the park, and joins up with the Grand Union Canal Walk, providing a vehicle-free link  to  the River Thames. Apart from the picturesque canal, another national heritage monument is the picture-postcard Wharncliffe Viaduct, which used to be (but unfortunately is no longer) home to a colony of Brown Long-eared Bats. A Canada Goose having a stretch. I first started birding sometime in the late naughties, and Brent River Park, being on my doorstep, was the place I would escape to on winter morning or summer evening walks,...

Danang Bird Club is now working with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology on an important initiative to help improve Merlin Bird ID in South East Asia. The project forms part of a wider effort to make Merlin’s Sound ID function work better across the whole Asian continent, where the app still has much more limited coverage than in North America and Europe. For anyone who has used Merlin while birding in South East Asia, this will probably come as no surprise. The app can be remarkably good at recognising some familiar calls, but there are many species for which it either gives no suggestion at all or produces an uncertain result. This is particularly noticeable in forests, where many of the birds we encounter are more often heard than seen. Merlin Sound ID is a machine-learning system, and like any such system it needs a large quantity of good-quality training data. Cornell's Merlin team uses sound recordings archived in the Macaulay Library, many of them submitted by birders through eBi...