@Denny I was feeling a bit frustrated that I couldn’t identify a bird this morning, but then I reflected that the number of birds I can identify since moving here, while modest, is a big jump for me.
@Denny Merlin is a good tool. I was playing with it last spring and it picked out individual species from a pretty thick cacophony, which was great for me, because I'm terrible at remembering which sound goes with which bird. And then I could start to hear variations in calls of individual species, meanings of which I could only guess. Fascinating to find "song" start to unwind into individual conversations.