What’s that bird? Merlin Bird ID app
Have you ever seen a new bird at the feeder and wanted to know more about it? Or perhaps you heard a bird call and wondered what species was making the sound? There’s an app for that!
With the help of funding from a grant from the National Science Foundation, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology created the free Merlin Bird ID cell phone app in 2014 to help everyday people identify the birds around them. With more than 10 million downloads to date, there are three options for identifying birds: Step by Step, Photo ID and Sound ID.
Step by Step asks the user five questions about the bird: location, date, size, color and what the bird was doing. The app then provides a list of potential species.
Photo ID analyzes a photo and provides a suggested species.
Perhaps the most impressive function is the Sound ID. Simply click the button to activate your cell phone’s microphone and watch as the app maps the sounds it hears and suggests bird species in real time.
The identifications take into account your location and time of year to suggest birds you are most likely to encounter. Sound ID currently includes 2,066 total species, 638 of which are in the United States and Canada. The other IDs cover more than 6,000 species and the full field guide includes information on more than 10,000 bird species.
Sound recordings can be saved and the app includes a Life List so you can keep track of all the species you have encountered.
Beyond identifications, the Merlin app provides a wealth of information about all kinds of birds, including information on habitat, range and more. Or you can scroll through a list of birds likely to be found in a particular area on a particular day. For example, there were 167 species of birds that were likely in Castle Pines in late October, including the black-capped chickadee, red-tailed hawk, blue jay and dark-eyed junco.
For more information or to download the app visit merlin.allaboutbirds.org.
By Rachel Poe; images courtesy of the Merlin Bird app
