Tyler Barton

IDENTIFICATION LAKE

THE BEGINNING BIRDER WORKSHOP BECOMES a memorial service for all that’s been deleted to make space for Merlin, the phone app for birdsong.

It’s so accurate, the women agree.

When we went to Asheville, says a man from behind the beige net of a bug jacket, I had to download the Warbler two-pack, so Wells Fargo went bye-bye. No idea how much money I’ve got, but Merlin said I heard a Blackburnian the other day. I shit you ladies not.

“Let’s—” says the guide, “with that language.” The guide looks young, very young, and has the kind of young energy that belies a persistent fear of seeming brainless.

For me, says a woman in a sunhat, it’s the grandbaby. Hours of him babbling and laughing. What do I delete? What do I keep? What’s another hundred bird sounds in my telephone really going to do for me?

Like a Band-Aid, I don’t even watch before I click Trashcan. Trashcan. Trash—

I tried to get rid of the clock app so I could keep both my New England Scavenger’s pack and the panoramic pics from the top of Mt. Marcy. The photos are gone in an instant, but the clock, bucko, you’re stuck with it!

What I always get mixed up is the clock and the calculator. I go to set an alarm and I’m hitting division signs.

The group quiets for the crackle of a—

“Gray catbird,” says the guide, before anyone can swipe. The feather sticking from his felt hat once belonged to a loon. “Male, I’m guessing. Let’s take our first pause here.”

The man in the bug jacket has been going through his contacts. He’s calling them all. Says, If they don’t recognize my number, or my voice, or the bird sound I play for them—some of these of course were friends, at one time or another—they get deleted. Now I have about six contacts, but I have all the packs. Even the South Asian Expansion. No plans to go, but some mornings I play the myna bird’s squawking through the Bluetooth speaker on my back porch, just to see what happens, who shows up to greet me.

They truly do a believable impression of people.

“You know, you can email yourself,” says the guide quietly to the woman in the sunhat. “I personally don’t think you need that app at all, but if you need space, you can absolutely send yourself emails with things you want to keep. Photos, phone numbers—”

The moment something becomes an email, the man says, I have no idea where it is or what has happened to it.

One of the women: My son downloaded me a program called Inbox Doctor, I’m paying through the nose because I still haven’t reached my deductible.

The guide faces the group, leads the way with his back, but it’s unclear what he can hear and what he can’t. He was too recently a child. They can see it in his eyes. They enter the old-growth forest, balsams and beeches elbowing it out beneath the canopy of towering white pines. The bright arrows of downed birch trunks point them in every direction.

So you don’t use this at all? one woman says, holding her phone up and waving it for the guide’s attention.

“Sure, I use it as a tool at times, but I try not to rely on it. I want to escape into the woods, which means not having them tracking my location constantly, which—and it kills your battery. So, you get all the way out there, they know where you are, and then you can’t even use your phone to call for help.”

Who are they?

“Oh, you know, just—the cloud of information.”

Oh God, did Facebook buy Merlin?

No! Cornell University owns Merlin. Cornell’s the good guys.

“Plus, I reject the whole idea that information equals learning. Was anyone actually listening to that call we just heard, or did it simply register to you as a bird, like the sound triggered in your head, time to open the app? It’s Pavlovian.”

Is that some sort of warbler?

Maybe one of the New World warblers?

I see what you mean, son, but—who has the time? I thought when I retired my time would finally pile up and stretch out ahead me, but all I see are clocks, all I hear is ticking.

Is anyone else’s Merlin coming up only in dark mode?

Must be an update.

Or you’ve been selected for a beta test! I’ve heard about this. Very exciting. Can I see it? asks the man in the bug jacket, leaning over her shoulder. I mean, congratulations.

Look. See?

Oh, that’s… different.

✦

They take the Merganser Marsh Trail to the Boreal Forest Walkway, a course of wooden planks over the bog, where the wet, red-green mouths of pitcher plants await rainwater and prey. The woman in the sunhat leans out over the moss believing it’s only a picture she’s taking. A pair of palm warblers alight in a larch.

Apparently up here they call them tamaracks.

Oh, I used have an app that told me the trees! But I had to give it up—

“It’s not that I don’t see the value in… the app… you know, the ease of identification,” says the guide, but he’s backpedaling too fast. Various members of the tour nod to be nice. They can’t really hear him.

After unzippering the hood of his bug netting, the man asks, Does anyone hear a hermit thrush? Right? Is that one that sings its song back to itself?

Oh shoot, a woman says, didn’t we lose a bunch of thrushes in the latest update? I think I read about—

I did read about a glitch.

The guide can’t help himself. “Purple finch.”

Besides the woods, says the man in the bug jacket, the only place I’m ever in is my house. I understand singing real loud just to keep yourself sane.

You’re not in the woods enough, is your problem.

The problem is that the email app alone takes up so much room!

“You can email via text,” the guide says, smiling to hide his clenched teeth.

You can email through a text?

“You can go into your texting app and type your email address like it’s a phone number.”

I don’t think I can email through text.

There’s not much you can’t email through at this point, says the man.

“Of course, you can’t email via your brain—yet,” says the guide, trying to laugh, “Can’t email via eye contact, via concentration, via patience. The thing about meditation and birding is… Can we pause?”

Someone goes down, legs breaking through the marsh’s yellow moss. Her sunhat slips from her head. She is swallowed to the hip in the mud. Screams rip from her face. Birds emerge from across the bog, darting back toward the woods. Her phone has fallen into the open throat of a pitcher plant.

Dawn—they’re carnivorous! one woman calls.

Oh, it eats spiders, not humans. Just reach in—quick!

A great blue heron glides overhead. Its stringy plumage dangles like an old beard.

Dawn is helped back onto the planks, her bottom half black and green and shimmering with grime. She’s deep into the kind of sob you can’t hear, just her mouth open and body shuddering. The guide keeps trying to explain about a jar of rice at the Welcome Center, how you’d have to really run to get there, would have to leave the device for hours, maybe a day.

She stumbles back the way they came and is not seen again.

✦

Four non-visible birds sound in turn:

One call is a sharp, squeaky iik, like sneakers on a mall floor.

One’s got a long downhill song, a falling-down-a-hill-a-lone song.

Another makes of its notes a fluty, rolling tempo.

The last has a soft, wheezy we-ep. We-ep. We-ep.

They think they hear crying again.

Merlin’s telling me it’s that woman, says the man. Dawn. That can’t be right?

It even shows her face, he says. I didn’t realize it could identify humans.

He’s joking. You’re joking, right? He’s joking.

Well, she was in tears.

Wouldn’t you be?

Making quite a sound.

A sound I hardly recognized.

Well, you’re no Merlin.

✦

Woodpeckers cruise into the cavity of a beech. Downy or hairy? The babies’ beaks emerge like gun barrels from the porthole of a battleship. The black-throated blue warbler is heard but not seen, not confirmed. Or was that a black-throated green?

The guide says, “That app is simply—it’s ruining birding.”

He stops walking backward, trips as he turns. The feather falls from his cap. He’s yelling now: “People play the calls full volume in the forest. They cup their hands around the phone speaker, or they use like a—like a canteen lid to amplify it. You do something like that, and you’re bringing the birds to you.”

People actually do that?

Tourists do.

Tourists? Bucko, it’s still mud season. You think I don’t live down the road?

Hey Lenore, the kid thinks we’re cheaters.

He thinks we’d rip the stickers off a Rubik’s Cube!

“But this isn’t a game. Excuse me—we’re pausing.”

For me it’s all about the hunt.

“We’re not hunters! This is the opposite of hunting! When you do that, when you play fake sounds out loud, you’re slowly teaching animals to abandon the one thing they still have over humans—that they trust themselves. They still believe in one another.”

The problem is there are just so many birds. Sparrows alone. They take up like twelve pages in Sibley’s—come on. I’m already old. Give me a hand! says the man who offers the guide his loon feather back. Son, he says, you’ll miss this.

“And there will be fewer birds, fewer songs, if they stop learning how to communicate with each other because the fucking robots—the cyborgs—keep fucking with their heads.”

Excuse me? What happened to language?

“The point of bird watching—and that is what we’re doing here, bird watching, is not a game of Jeopardy. The bird-watcher aims to become fully bird-aware. Bird-awareness is not achieved by shouting common names in the woods. The woods, which should, keep in mind, be absent of us. A birder aims to integrate with the landscape. That’s the only way to really see, to really absorb an atmosphere, to become one with it. So I’m going to ask us all to spread out and find a place to sit, and I mean it, find your own space. This is, I’ll remind us all, a workshop.”

✦

He seems upset. They’re guessing the guide’s parents were millennials. They think maybe the guide’s parents were either always gone in their devices or else totally off grid. He’s gone very far ahead. They’re going to give him a minute. They’re going to sit here and try to see a bird that’s not a robin. They decide it would be good to leave the guide a kind review, the uppermost number of stars.

I think I’ll say I learned something. Not necessarily about birds…

I’m worried Merlin is always learning, one woman says before she’s shushed.

Information isn’t learning, remember?

Plus, that’s what makes it amazing! By the way, how much space do you think the Crosby, Stills, & Nash Greatest Hits takes up? says the man in the bug jacket.

The group quiets.

An actual pause.

Who needs music?

Exactly!

Do you know what I mean?

Of course.

They don’t even notice their legs falling asleep.

They’re not hearing much of anything anymore.

Soon enough they have all opened to their Merlins. What comes up on every screen is the masked booby of the Dry Tortugas. They close the app. Restart the phone. It begins to reload. Now what each person sees is their own face staring back at them. It even knows their names. Hello, Lenore. Maybe information is learning. Perhaps more than what we tell it. The guide is gone. No one knows what’s happening, whether or not the app has malfunctioned, or, now that the workshop is over, how to return to the place where they started.

TYLER BARTON is a writer and artist living in Saranac Lake, New York. His books include Eternal Night at the Nature Museum (Sarabande) and The Quiet Part Loud (Split/Lip). His stories have appeared in Electric Literature, The Iowa Review, and The Kenyon Review, and have twice been listed at Distinguished in the Best American Short Stories anthology.