As a volunteer reviewer for eBird, Tim Carney’s role is to review bird observations logged in multiple counties in Maryland to ensure they are as accurate as possible. In a typical migration season, he might receive up to 50 reports of uncommon species that require him to email users for additional documentation. But in the past couple of years, Carney says, his workload has grown dramatically. Dubious reports have poured in without sufficient evidence to support them. Carney says that’s because more birders have been attributing their identifications to Merlin Sound ID, a tool created, like eBird, by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. For the most part, the Merlin app’s Sound ID feature, launched in 2021, is a birder’s dream. Activate it, and it transforms the bird sounds it hears into images that depict pitch and volume. The app then renders a real-time species identification, using artificial intelligence trained to read those images, called spectrograms. The experience...