09-43: Inside Merlin with Miyoko Chu & Alli Smith
The American Birding Podcast
naswick
4.7 • 677 Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's hard to overstate in influence of Cornell's Merlin on the growth of birding over the last few years. What began as a simple tool for helping people to identify bird photos has become so much more, reaching millions of nature enthusiasts and even some celebrities. Miyoko Chu. Senior Director of Science Communitcations at the Lab, and Alli Smith, Project Coordinator for Merlin, join us to talk about what it's like to be in the middle of one this massive movement for nature lovers.
If you're interested in taking advantage of the sound recording workshop offered by Cornell and mentioned earlier in the conversation, American Birding Podcast listeners can save 40% using the discount code RecordMerlin40 at checkout through December 31, 2025.
Also, the ABA mourns Tony Fitzpatrick, and welcome birders to Fort Myers this weekend.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Burning Association. |
| 0:09.6 | I'm Nate Swick. |
| 0:10.9 | Many here at the ABA are mourning the recent loss of Tony Fitzpatrick earlier this month. |
| 0:18.3 | Tony was our 2020 Bird of the Year artist, a Chicago institution whose work |
| 0:24.0 | extended beyond fine art into poetry, acting, and more. He was, as much as he was anything, a real |
| 0:32.6 | bird lover too. That's part of the reason we asked him to work with us in 2020, and his cedar wax |
| 0:38.6 | wing cover art remains one of the most popular and certainly the most unique interpretations |
| 0:43.6 | of any bird of the year that we have had in the program. |
| 0:48.2 | To illustrate all of this, he wrote in a 2016 memoir, |
| 0:53.4 | Every morning my grandmother Mamie would toast a couple pieces of bread |
| 0:56.6 | sometimes she'd put jelly on them and she'd throw them off the back stooped for the birds and then |
| 1:01.2 | she'd watch them through the window i asked my grandmother why she was giving bread to the birds |
| 1:05.5 | and she quietly told me for a piece of bread you can God sing. Birds were music for poor people. |
| 1:12.6 | It was then that I first started drawing birds and reading about them, and I haven't stopped since. |
| 1:18.7 | To say that Tony was larger than life probably undersells him quite a bit. |
| 1:24.2 | When I interviewed him for the annual Bird of the year artist episode, our conversation |
| 1:27.8 | kind of wound around the birds themselves to his Catholic upbringing in Chicago, to his |
| 1:33.5 | eclectic tastes, to the musicians and artists that he frequently collaborated with, to his |
| 1:38.7 | bird art that was singularly Tony, as distinctive as anything in the art world, this crazy collage of colors and |
| 1:47.0 | patterns and items that were important to him. And in the middle, a bird species that had |
| 1:52.5 | peaked his interest or inspired him. He was gregarious and big-hearted and as generous with |
| 1:58.7 | his time and his talents as anyone could be, |
... |
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