I love this app! Just started using it a month or so ago to figure out who the loud ass bird in the woods behind my house was which ended up being a Tufted Titmouse (who are now one of my favorites, so awesome looking) and a Carolina Wren (not as pretty but makes up for it with its songs).
For the last month, my morning routine has completely changed and instead of sitting inside. I now spend my mornings out back refilling and cleaning feeders, putting out some peanuts to appease the squirrels, and then plopping down on the deck with some coffee/breakfast and MerlinID running on my phone.
I'm no good at learning a new human language but after a month of using this app regularly, I can consistently ID not just the different species, but also some individual birds by their distinct calls and voices.
The only thing I wish it had is a way to catalog individual birds and have recordings of their calls and pictures of them saved together.
Hats off to the devs of this app, hands down the best app I've used in a long time!
Not sure what you mean - both the "Explore" part and the Life List both have the pics and the calls together?
It is indeed a good app, but my beef is how bad it is at adding birds to your life list. After ID'ing a bird by sound or picture it'll ask you where/when you found it with the worst defaults -- it'll know where you are and what time it is, but it sometimes randomly picks some time/place you've been at months ago (even ignoring that you may have just entered several at your current location)!
If you’re getting serious into birding, a lot of folks do the lists with the separate app eBird, which lets you make lists of birds you’ve seen on say, a given walk in a specific park.
It’s like a digital version of a bird checklist you might find at a wildlife refuge.
(Pro tip, if you have 100 seagulls you don’t want to count individually, you can use X to say you don’t know. Also you can enter a general group like “gull sp.” if you can’t quite identify which kind of seagull they are)
Oh yeah, I use those features, what I want is to be able to isolate specific calls and store that exact sound clip along with pictures I took to try and keep track of individual birds that visit regularly.
To me, Merlin is the shining example of what "a computer in everyone's pocket" could have been. Such an amazing app that connects so many people more intimately with the world around them.
I get occasional nudges to support their organization, but it's a clear and direct appeal, there are no dark patterns that I'm aware of.
Merlin is run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, so it should (hopefully!) remain good and free, unlike apps by private companies with a profit motive.
Yes! It's a rare example of an app that instead of trying to capture your attention into a virtual environment, helps you to direct it outwards into the real world.
The sound id in particular is just an amazing way to really extend what's possible for most people, and provides an on-ramp for people to identify more birds by ear alone (and in general to pay more attention to sound when in nature).
I might argue that Merlin — and especially eBird — lean a bit to heavily to the competitive "high scores" view of birding; given the impact of climate change on bird populations, encouraging people to travel the world and see as many species as possible is clearly problematic.
But that's a minor quibble, and Merlin remains one of the few apps I'd unconditionally recommend to anyone with the faintest chance they'd use it.
I'm friends with some of the researchers on the Sound ID portion of this app! The team's gone to great lengths to make sure the machine learning models and evals are solid.
Under the hood, Sound ID is a great example of how "domain-expert-driven" careful research can give more reliable results than just feeding in data and hoping for the best.
I would like to see a version of the app that assigns names, as in 'Fred', 'Bertha', 'Kevin' to given birds, algorithmically. I get the same birds in my garden and I already know what species they are, but, I wouldn't mind knowing if my favourite birds have got new mates, or, if I am down the road, some way from home, to confirm that it is 'Kevin' that I see, as in the same 'Kevin' that frequents my bird bath.
Consistently assigning names to different blackbirds might be tricky, but, for other birds, I am sure that some AI algorithm could do this.
I'm definitely impressed with the sound ID. One time there was a cacophony of birds singing outside my house at varying distances, and the app was able to identify 6 different bird species within 30 seconds. All 6 suggestions seemed reasonable to me.
We sometimes joke it's hallucinating when it detects something unexpected, but often it was being accurate. I saw my first ever male Blackburnian Warbler a couple weeks ago after Merlin picked it up.
Pass them my thanks. I've been using the Sound ID on dog walks for a few years now and I love it. It's made me much more interested in the birds around me now, and if it tags a new bird that I've not come across before I'll often try to spot it. I think I'm a bird spotter now.
Someone near my house has a rooster that does his thing every morning. And every morning I look at the app hoping to see him pop up in the ID list but alas, it never IDs him.
Please Let your friends know that roosters are birds too and deserve their recognition as the world's wake up call! Lol
I was really impressed when I took a trip to England and it recognized european birds. At one point it said there was a Rose-ringed Parakeet which seemed totally wrong, but then we saw a bunch of them in Hyde park a couple days later.
The iOS app did seem to lock up when trying to download the region packs though. I should find out where to file a bug!
I'd love an API of some sort. I have some birdwatching/tracking ideas that require I can id a bird by sound and Merlin would be the best route if they just let people us it ...
I like how the app shows reference calls/songs for detected birds so I can verify using my own judgement, or to figure out which birds are which when there's a lot of chirping going on.
It’s so great this app is getting attention. Hopefully the devs/PMs come here and pay attention.
The sound ID works very well, especially in the jungles/forests of Colombia with zero network availability.
The rest of the app needs a lot of love, though. Buttons don’t work often, screens are inconsistent, results get lost, and more issues.
Features: I’d love an iNaturalist bridge. Going back into a previous recording shows “No matches” when the original capture did. Many times we’re with groups in nature, and we ID something, but it’s gone by the time we show it to someone.
A quick starting point would be to add a quick feedback button vs opening a web form, so issues can be reported conveniently.
And a resounding thank you to everyone making this app possible!
> Buttons don’t work often, screens are inconsistent, results get lost, and more issues.
What device are you using, out of curiosity? I use this app almost daily for months at a time across several generations of the Google Pixel, I haven't had any of these issues even one time. I'm not even sure what you mean by "we ID something, but it’s gone by the time we show it to someone". Like, it shows a match while you're recording, but the ID disappears after you've stopped the recording?
I've found the app starts hiccuping when I'm making a very long recording, but I've learned to just cut it off and start a new one after about 10 minutes.
Going to second this opinion. I use this app almost daily as well on an iPhone 15 Pro. I have zero problems with responsiveness. I have seen a small lag when I start to get to 45m-1hr recordings, but even that isn't all too bad.
The only problem I had was when I had a OnePlus phone. It would show the little circles of "I found a bird" but not actually identify anything, and as far as I know it was a OnePlus specific bug. I have a Pixel now, and it works perfectly.
When I was in Aruba there was no bird pack which covered the island, but the one for Venezuela seemed to work for most birds that I heard.
> I've found the app starts hiccuping when I'm making a very long recording, but I've learned to just cut it off and start a new one after about 10 minutes.
What phone are you using? I record ten hours a day and never get any issues whatsoever, so I'm not even sure what you mean by "hiccups".
> The sound ID works very well, especially in the jungles/forests of Colombia with zero network availability.
Interesting. I find that the sound ID works well if:
- I have my phone out of my pocket and exposed to the air (obviously, if the microphone is muffled, it may cause problems).
- I'm not moving (my footsteps seem to interfere no matter how loud the bird is)
- The Merlin App is running with "focus" (i.e., if Merlin sound ID is running in the background, it seems less likely to detect songs and calls). I don't know if this is really true or if I have a subconscious bias.
- There are also weird effects where it will sometimes fail to notice really loud obvious birds nearby (e.g., baltimore orioles directly above me) but it will nail a faint and distant song.
It would also be nice if it could show the part of the sonogram that forms the basis of its ID call. It is especially difficult for me to examine a sonogram when there are multiple birds singing at once.
> The rest of the app needs a lot of love, though. Buttons don’t work often, screens are inconsistent, results get lost, and more issues.
I have the opposite experience, but that may be a phone-specific issue??
Definitely submit full OS and hardware details, and adb logcat crash logs if you can. There's a million possibilities of the cause of the problem, with all the different android hardware out there.
I tried adding a 2nd region when I was in Europe and it locked up. I had to reinstall the app to get it back to a usable state. Adding region packs is totally broken on iOS.
Be careful when playing the bird songs. A few days ago I clicked on the cardinal song that was in my identification list and the male cardinal nesting in my hedge went NUTS and I’ve not seen either of them since, and used to see them daily. They’re very territorial.
I’m afraid that I scared them away from an active nest by accident just playing around with the app. :(
"Calling back" is a term I heard after getting into birding. I don't think they warn the user in the app enough about "Please don't use this to call to birds, only listen for your own reference".
If I were a bird, and another mysterious bird sound came that was speaking a certain feeling or phrase I could understand, and I come to see it's a giant monkey man playing the sounds from himself, I would probably move my family, too.
Yes, Cardinals are pretty territorial and chase each other out. Esp during nesting.
Whether it's whistling close to their tones, "Pishing" to get their attention, or playing sounds from phones, all of it interrupts their normal behavior. Cars, trucks, lawnmowers, motorcycles all mess with them too.
>When song is played in a bird’s territory, that bird’s response to the “intruder” is watched attentively by neighboring males and by females. In one study (Mennill et al 2002) high-ranking male Black-capped Chickadees exposed to aggressive playback lost status as their mates and neighbors apparently perceived them as losers, unable to drive away the phantom intruder.
It's clear we're capable of mimicking their language with our devices and playing it back to them has potential consequences to breaking up a family of birds.
> Sound ID is trained on audio recordings that are first converted to visual representations (spectrograms), then analyzed using computer vision tools similar to those that power Photo ID.
Yeah, the spectrogram scrolling by at the top isn't just a cute gimmick, that's actually how the recognition works...
When working in a linguistics lab as an undergraduate long ago, we looked at spectrograms to identify sounds (specifically places of articulation) as much as listened to recordings.
So it makes some sense to build a model on them rather than some other representation of the sound.
I've been birdwatching (birding?) actively for a few years now, but only this year did I start using these sound identifiers. What a boon it's been! I've already spotted over a dozen new species by sound alone, and also learned to identify some of them by myself.
It really has opened up a whole new venue of enjoying this hobby. At least here, machine learning/AI has a clear, positive impact.
In general as a bird watcher i’ve been extremely impressed by this tech. I generally trust it.
There’s only a couple of times i’ve been sceptical of it’s id and thats where there’s similar species in the area. Eg. I’m not convinced there really is a purple finch where i live when all i see is house finches all day. But i could be wrong too! It’s proven itself enough that i’m not ready to call it wrong on that one.
It definitely has trouble with similar species sometimes — I've noticed it recently with crows and warblers. But it does a great job generally and direct observation of the bird usually clears up the confusion.
I have a bunch of Blue Jays around my house and it turns out they are so good at imitating a specific hawk species(blanking on its name) that Merlin actually reports it as the hawk! I went and listened to real recordings of that hawks call and I couldn't tell it apart from the Jays imitation call.
Now, I know it's technically possible it was a real id, but Im pretty sure the bald eagle it detected was actually one of the kids down the street running around screaming lol
Surely your local blujays must have heard the hawk somewhere in order to learn its call? It figures that a hawk would occasionally show up in your neighborhood.
Machine identification can still need some manual confirmation, even though this app does a really good job. It’s not a confirmed sighting until you have a visual confirmation.
In this case, while I couldn't see it directly while he was making the call, I had watched him fly to and land in a nearby tree before the call and then shortly after watched it take off. So I can't be 100% sure, but I'd be willing to bet that it was the Jay.
The only errors I've seen it make with common birds in the UK are also with finches - specifically with the greenfinch's "at rest" twitter, which it consistently mistakes for a goldfinch.
The two are visually distinctive but, in Merlin's defence, I can't tell them apart by ear either!
But I do have a complaint, that you can't upload an image via the web from your PC. For those of us who use a DSLR for our birding photos, the UX to have to transfer images to our phone to send them through the app is really painful.
It isn't the end of the world. It just makes me ID my birds in other ways. But it would be nice to provide non-mobile UX options.
I'm the author of the Birder framework (a computer vision toolkit for bird classification) - https://gitlab.com/birder/birder
It's still in early alpha, but you might find it useful for your DSLR workflow.
If you're interested in trying a web-based alternative, I have a demo space at https://huggingface.co/spaces/birder-project/birder-image-cl... where you can upload images directly from your browser.
Fair warning though - it's primarily designed to showcase the models rather than provide any kind of user experience, so you'll need to manually select the appropriate regional model (look for suffixes like eu-common, arabian-peninsula, etc. based on where your photos were taken).
The coverage is still very limited... More regions will follow in the coming months.
thanks for linking, I'm very excited for this--it's always saddened me that the public Merlin models are limited to the ones they've released for competitions that are now many years out of date.
my use case is adding tags to my Lightroom library with identified species.
I also use a dslr for my bird pics. When it comes time to id the bird I take a picture of my monitor and feed that to the app. The app doesn’t need my 48MP images to do the job. The screenshot is fine.
I do the same thing, but I only ID photos that I consider good enough to post, once posted they're accessible from my phone (Flickr, IG, et al) so it's no big deal to grab them and insert them into the app.
We have a Mockingbird in our backyard (or more precisely, we live in his/her territory) that impersonates a Gila woodpecker. We were able to record it. Playing back the video and using Bird ID actually shows it as a Gila Woodpecker.
Oh, that's not my experience at all! I downloaded this app to see how many distinct songs a mockingbird was singing one time (it was a lot) and the app just came back: "Mockingbird". I was both amazed and disappointed!
I have a Blue Jay that began imitating a Cooper's Hawk after one started showing up in the neighborhood. In its early attempts at imitation, it was still recognized as a Blue Jay, but the Blue Jay has improved and it now comes up as a Cooper's Hawk! I watch it sing, so I know this is the Blue Jay, not the hawk.
Loving these kind of apps :-)
I personally use WhoBird, which runs complete local on your android device, so it works also when you don't have internet and is available on fdroid (https://f-droid.org/packages/org.woheller69.whobird/).
Will give merlin a shot as well to see how it compares
I would love for someone to make a birding/citizen scientist app that's well gamified. This is basically pokemon. You go places and find different creatures and collect them.
I would love to play that game, and the data could maybe be useful for researchers.
On the other hand, people playing Pokemon GO trespassed private property and protected spaces, so I wonder how far would the players of this game go just to make a pic of a "legendary" animal at the border of extinction.
Seek is impressive just for the sheer number of completely different things it could identify, from mosses to animals. I used it to find native and invasive plants in my garden.
This is exactly the metaphor I use for this app! It's great.
I've used Merlin for years and it works great most of the time. Agree with others that it's a great example of something we should all have on the tiny computers in our pockets.
Until this thread I didn't realise it did photo ID! I took a photo of a black redstart last year and at the time was able to identify it via photos uploaded to social media. But I just tried the app and it got it straight away. It also added it as a new 'lifer' because I hadn't previously logged it via audio ID. Cool!
It's very nice, I prefer it to Birdnet-pi. It's been running very well for a few months now. It's cool to see the daily and seasonal changes in the detections.
I never thought I would ever actively watch for birds when I hear them. Or that I would be able to say "this is clearly a Wren". Or that I have a my favourite bird (Wren as well btw).
This is the first time I’ve heard of this kind of app, and it honestly sounds like a little piece of magic. You just hold up your phone, and it tells you which bird is singing nearby.
There are often birds outside my window some I know, some I don’t. I used to just wonder quietly, but now it feels like I might finally get some answers. Especially when I’m out in nature and see those beautiful birds with long tails it’d be great to finally know their names.
Also, when my kid asks me “What bird is that?” I might finally have an actual answer instead of just guessing.
I think I’ll try it out one morning. Even recognizing just one new bird might make my whole walk feel different.
This app changed my life. I got into hiking and outdoor spaces when I married my wife and she wanted me to join her in camping, something I never did as a kid. This iteratively got me more into natural spaces and wildlife, but only as a passing curiosity.
But then one morning while camping, I woke up to a symphony of birdsong. Many calls, but there were at least dozens of a call echoing throughout the forest of a flute-like bird with a trill at the end. I was enchanted. I had used the Merlin app previously just to ID some city birds near my house, but I remembered I had it and found that dozens of wood thrushes were singing their song to me that morning. It's my favorite sound in the world, I've got a tattoo on my arm of the spectrogram of their song, and I make it a point to camp where I expect them to sing every year.
This created a journey into a love and personal involvement in the natural world that has changed me for the better.
Yeah I use it almost everyday. I've gotten to where I frequently recognize new birds. I don't talk about it much because I haven't fully come to terms with entering a bird watching phase of my life, but occasionally I'll say something like "Oh that Northern Flicker is back" and my wife will be totally confused. We live in Brooklyn near Prospect Park and have a backyard so we get a pretty wide range of birds.
In particular, it makes nocmig drastically more approachable. Be warned, though, that the false positive rate is extremely high (which is to be expected).
Fantastic app. My wife and I are gradually becoming able to recognise more and more birds by their call. This is great because the human ear is better than the app at rejecting environmental noise - so we can spot birds by their call even close to a noisy road when the app cannot.
The app, at least on my Pixel 6, struggles with very high frequency calls - e.g. long-tailed tits.
I find it great for familiar birds that only make certain calls when they are less visible and others out in the open. Let's you connect the variety of sounds throughout the day to specific species.
I feel like we share interests and location. The long-tailed tits in Wimbledon present no trouble for Merlin my Samsung phone, but I've never seen a nightingale round here.
This app has been great. I've used it a lot to identify the birds that inhabit my back yard.
I tried using it in New Zealand last year, and it wasn't as effective as in the US: I think it hasn't been trained as well on the native New Zealand birds, many of which aren't found anywhere else.
Amusingly, it identified turkeys when we were in New Zealand, which I was irritated with because there clearly weren't any turkeys in New Zealand. It turned out I was wrong when we came across a flock of them in the Waikato area running around in a sheep field. A local told me that they were brought there around a hundred years ago and are mostly left alone because nobody eats turkey in New Zealand.
It's worth being aware that the developer of the Android app asserts that "...this app doesn't share user data with other companies or organizations" but according to Exodus Privacy this is not true: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.labs.me...
Exodus can only show what code is likely included, not what data is sent out. For example I'd classify a crash stacktrace without any extra information as not sharing user data. Exodus doesn't contradict the authors, but they could specify what the services are used for.
Note that the recent iOS update seems to have introduced a bug whereby even after stopping recording, the app in the background will continue to use SIGNIFICANT battery life, so I've needed to start force-closing the app after using it.
My father is in his 80’s, has poor hearing aids, but still goes out daily with his dSLR and Merlin to see what’s around him and he still gets great shots. I’m really happy Merlin exists.
Another parent in my kid's Cub Scout pack told me about this a few years ago. It's been really cool to use on camping trips, and lately I've been using it while walking the dog. There's a lot more different types of birds around me than I had realized.
If you're interested in this, https://www.birdweather.com/ is a kinda neat automated sound-based bird ID and tracker in a nice little package. I'm not involved with it in any way, I've just seen it around recently and I'm interested in this space. You might also like Wildlife Sound Recording Society (WSRS) https://www.wildlife-sound.org/
I identified a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-whiskered_bulbul in our garden thanks to this amazing app! Me and my wife love birding and at the end of the year we compare our scores, it is playful entertainment. And we are introducing our daughter to it, it is so cute when she identifies one!
My favorite part of the app is the spectrogram - I'm not sure exactly why but seeing the songs has made learning which bird goes with which song so much easier.
I wish when I uploaded a photo for analysis, and the app identifies my bird, that I could keep MY photo and not the generic one in their database. It's great at building a checklist, but not so much for making it feel like my own.
If you use the companion app called ebird, you can save your checklists. Later you can upload your photos and any audio you have recorded. Those get vetted by regional bird experts and get added to the scientific data. It's fun to go back and relive past hikes and trips viewing your pictures on the ebird.org website!
On the Android app, tap the share button at the top of the recording play screen. This lets you export the audio WAV file. Select some other audio player app to share to, such as Podcast Addict, and use that app's Cast feature once it opens.
Me too. I was out hiking and ran into an old guy I know. He is 90 years old and he's a bird biologist and a naturalist by vocation. I changed my plans for the day and hiked with him for a few hours. He talked quite a bit about birds and ecology and it sparked my interest. I figured someone must've made an app to id bird calls, and I found Merlin in the Google store. Now I've been walking around trying to id every bird I hear. That was a few days ago, so seeing it here on HN is definitely a Baader–Meinhof moment.
I love this app, but after going back to review some of the rare birds I’ve noticed that many of my saved recordings have inexplicably disappeared.
I do wish it could also identify other insects/animals. I originally got the app to identify whatever bird sounded like a squeaky door or wooden swing, and eventually saw that it was a squirrel.
Q1: To my knowledge for the merlin app, no. Just local storage to your phone as a WAV file.
Q2: If you've started down the path of using Merlin, there is a companion app from the Cornell group called ebird. It used GPS to list birding Hotspot near your location. You can keep track of what you've seen. If you want to get extra verification on your sightings you can upload pictures and audio files at a later time on the ebird website. Real live humans, volunteer birding experts, will verify your sightings. I've gotten to meet some very knowledgeable birders through this process. All of this data goes into scientific research. On the ebird website the have specific protocols on what make for a good observation. It is my understanding that submitted and vetted photos and audio files will make it into the NN models used by the Merlin app.
I also recommend Seek and iNaturalist, a similar pair of apps for many kinds of life (plants, fungi, animals, insects, etc). Seek relies on camera instead of microphone to make IDs.
This app is awesome. The only minor complaint I have is that it does not handle long recordings well. For example, I left my phone near the window for an hour to identify as many birds as possible and the recording cannot finalize properly due to (supposedly) huge size of the produced file.
WhoBird is much better for this, as it's realtime and processed on-device. It stores a log of each bird identified along with the percentage match, and can optionally store a clip of the audio that triggered the match.
I've been using this for years - amazing while traveling.
I wish they'd add some non-bird noises to it as a courtesy since there are often whips and calls that are non birds, like insects or mammals. I think it would add some depth and the overhead shouldn't be too high.
As an amateur bird photographer I love this app, but I wish there was some way to pinpoint the direction the sound is coming from.
I have wondered if perhaps with 3 microphones positioned a specific distance apart from one another, an app could compare their relative volumes and show the user the exact location of a bird. Any smart HNers know if something like this is possible?
> I have wondered if perhaps with 3 microphones positioned a specific distance apart from one another, an app could compare their relative volumes and show the user the exact location of a bird.
I am no expert, but I do know that this is possible. It's called acoustic location [1].
> Civilian uses include locating wildlife and locating the shooting position of a firearm.
As to how spaced out the microphones would have to be and to what accuracy the location can be determined, I cannot say (but my guess would be "pretty accurate").
Another interesting challenge would be to determine the location of multiple birds in different locations. Perhaps isolating specific bird calls with some ML model and then acoustic-locating that specific call. I can imagine the application showing which bird is calling from where in 3D.
I really love Merlin as a hobbyist nature photographer. Not just the sound ID, but even more importantly it has a wonderful function that allows you to visually ID a bird from a photo. I don't know much about birds, other than having an appreciation at a distance and finding them photogenic, and Merlin has helped me learn a lot about the birds I've photographed as well as identifying them. This is one of the most important apps on my phone. One of the best things I've seen come out to the public from academia.
Its awesome to see the Cornell Lab of Ornithology continue its work in this way. I first heard of it through seeing mention of the "Haikubox" which is a self-contained BirdNet device. In looking it up I see that there is another commercial device and a DIY Raspberry based hardware. All are reviewed at the below link:
BirdNET-Go is nice, it runs on any linux box (raspi included) and can also analyze RTSP streams, so you can just connect any security camera audio you may already have outside.
Love this app. You don't have to be a professional birdwatcher (if that's a profession) to use it. Just open it, and start listening. It's really fun to see what kind of variety of birds around you.
I love this app, it's incredibly good on the Sound ID stuff. There is a Wildlife Trust nature reserve near where I live and I've found it incredibly useful to work out what I'm hearing/looking at.
Discovered this app a year ago and love it. Use it almost everytime I'm out on a walk or a bike ride. Glad to see it's getting some love here. I echo the sentiments of another commenter that said it's the shining example of what "a computer in everyone's pocket" could have been.
Merlin is far less capable in developing countries either because there’s less available crowdsourced data, or it’s intentionally suppressed to reduce its use by unskilled poachers
I won Merlin once. I didn't know you could win the game, but I was relaxing in my backyard and suddenly it notified me that I had found the merlin. I was so excited. I hadn't known that a merlin was a kind of bird.
I do wonder how accurate Merlin is. I certainly can't tell the bird calls apart, and I don't usually spot the bird in question, so it could just be lying to me half the time, and I'd probably never notice. But I sure do love the app as an amateur bird-liker.
Fellow amateur bird-liker here. Usually when you ID a bird it’ll provide you with a boatload of other recordings you can compare against if you’re unsure.
You can also use these recordings to annoy birds. Play their species' song and the bird will think there's a competitor nearby, and sometimes fly close to confront the interloper.
Needless to say, don't do this too much, but it can be useful for getting a visual on certain birds (like warblers).
Berlin's Museum of Natural History (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin) has a nice app for identifying plants and animals called Naturblick. It's available in English.
Love it. I do very occasional birdwatching, so I still don’t know most of the birds I meet. What I like about Bird ID is that when I see in binoculars a singing bird I can quickly identify it, check photos, and really confirm that it’s exactly that bird.
I’ve heard from more experienced birdwatchers that it can false identify in some cases, so I always try to confirm visually, but anyway, for my casual use it’s more than accurate enough.
The Sound ID is amazing. Been using it for a few years now. I usually just keep it on while I'm hiking and it identifies over a dozen birds in 20-30min, nearly all of which I've eventually verified are in the area.
The photo ID feature is okay, but I assume that's because the photos I take on my phone of far away birds is too pixelated.
I actually want a similar ID feature frog species; i hear a lot of croaking
I don’t believe so. Merlin is newer and uses a different architecture. BirdNet uses a CNN and its atomic sound units are 3 seconds long: Merlin can do real-time ID on continuous audio and I think uses a hybrid system.
I tried this yesterday and set it up for my wife. I was amazed at how many birds it picked up. There must be some amazing technology in the audio processing.
My <2yo son started excitedly pointing out birds flying by a kitchen window at home so we placed a feeder on the glass and he loves when they eat while he's eating. Then I found this app to start to try and identify the different frequent diners together. Was amazed at how well it worked even through the screen on the window.
This app is super useful to me because I'm always hearing new bird calls—from eagles and hawks to starlings and, yes, even the crows. It even motivated me to crate a BirdNET-PI (recognizing birds by sound). I highly recommend this app.
To folks in the Finger Lakes, the lab that makes the app regularly posts tech jobs on Cornell.edu, though that is likely impacted by Cornell's current hiring freeze.
Not reading just to say it is amazing and use it every time I know I will hear bird. It is even on my bed side so I can check any unusual bird during the morning bird session.
I really like this app, but last night I had an encounter in the dark with the most weird alien sounding bird, that uses so low frequencies that the app couldnt make anything out of it.
I realize this is a fault of my phones mic and not the app, btw!
I think the bird was one of the snipes (dvärgbeckasin?) because I met them before.
Did you actually see the bird? Some animals make sounds that are deceptively similar to birds (ex chipmunk chirps). Merlin won’t recognize these as “not a bird”; it just doesn’t recognize the sound at all.
Nope, but I heard the sound before and I am at least 70% confident after asking my ornitholog friend :-)
We don't have a huge load of animals making weird sounds around here, so one learns to recognize most of the strange ones after some years in the woods.
I've been using it for a few years now just to identify the local (Arizona) birds in my neighborhood. It was also fun to use it when I was in South Dakota last year. I've gotten most of my family interested in the same, just through use of the app
I love this. It used to work like magic but something happened and now it barely recognizes birds for me. Only if they are really close. Anyone else? Maybe my hardware is failing? I also travelled and loaded other packs and wonder if I messed up my DB.
I noticed it had a hard time when there was a consistent background noise going. If my home's AC is running, it can only ID the highest pitched birds and will fail to detect the lower pitched calls.
I've actually started setting my AC to keep the temp a little higher in the early mornings so it doesn't run as much while I'm outside.
A few months ago, there was an update that made the detection much stricter. I believe this was in part to detract people from posting false positives of rare birds to eBird.
Could be an issue with your mic (clogged? weak connection?). I just installed and used it and the app works perfectly for me and picks up birds that are calling faintly and in the distance.
I was visiting Yosemite a year-ish ago and a guide recommended this app and it was fantastic. My kids also loved getting the real-time info on what they were hearing, and trying to spot the various kinds of birds.
Strongly recommend it (though admittedly, I don't use it often in suburbia)
My 7 year old loves this app. He was running around the yard and going on walks with me like he was catching pokemon. He is not yet aware of Pokemon Go. I prefer he become a bird nerd in the short term if I can manage. Really cool stuff.
Amazing technology. Sometimes I wish they would gamify this tech, or make it into a social activity. A kind of 'pokemon go' for birdwatching. It would be a great opportunity to get people more interested in nature and conservation.
Wonderful app! Collecting birds is great fun and another fun use is to try and fool it by making my own bird noises and see if I can pass. Red-tailed hawk is my speciality. I can fool it ≈50% of the time once I’m warmed up.
I have been using it for a year since we bought a small farm. I donated to support them just last month. Great app. Only thing I see trip it up is mockingbirds.
I can't even select woodpeckers because apparently they're not supposed to live here? Not even a way to turn off that filter. Woodpeckers are very common here
I love this app. I let it run in the background when I walk my dogs at home and when I'm traveling and it is amazing how well it connects me with the world around me.
I love this app!! This and iSeek (plant/animal identification via photos) are a blast. Lived in the jungle in souteast Mexico the last couple years and I'm constantly reaching for these.
I recently discovered after years of using this app that it's possible to have the names of the birds in other languages than English, it's an option in the app settings.
I’ve used this app for a while, it’s really good and I’d highly recommend it if you want to learn more about the birds where you live in an accessible way.
I've been using Merlin (Pokemon GO for adults if you will) for a few months now. It's been pushing me to be outside more, explore, and be active in general. The social aspect is great too. I have friends who share when they come across a new one that we haven't seen in the area before. Kudos to the program.
Also so not sorry to throw off the algorithm at a local aviary identifying birds from tropical parts of the world.
Came here for this. My wife is a big Merlin fan, but I'm pretty hard of hearing and much more visually-orientated when it comes to the natural world. INat is a fantastic project, I've learned so much through it.
I love this app! Just started using it a month or so ago to figure out who the loud ass bird in the woods behind my house was which ended up being a Tufted Titmouse (who are now one of my favorites, so awesome looking) and a Carolina Wren (not as pretty but makes up for it with its songs).
For the last month, my morning routine has completely changed and instead of sitting inside. I now spend my mornings out back refilling and cleaning feeders, putting out some peanuts to appease the squirrels, and then plopping down on the deck with some coffee/breakfast and MerlinID running on my phone.
I'm no good at learning a new human language but after a month of using this app regularly, I can consistently ID not just the different species, but also some individual birds by their distinct calls and voices.
The only thing I wish it had is a way to catalog individual birds and have recordings of their calls and pictures of them saved together.
Hats off to the devs of this app, hands down the best app I've used in a long time!
Not sure what you mean - both the "Explore" part and the Life List both have the pics and the calls together?
It is indeed a good app, but my beef is how bad it is at adding birds to your life list. After ID'ing a bird by sound or picture it'll ask you where/when you found it with the worst defaults -- it'll know where you are and what time it is, but it sometimes randomly picks some time/place you've been at months ago (even ignoring that you may have just entered several at your current location)!
If you’re getting serious into birding, a lot of folks do the lists with the separate app eBird, which lets you make lists of birds you’ve seen on say, a given walk in a specific park. It’s like a digital version of a bird checklist you might find at a wildlife refuge.
(Pro tip, if you have 100 seagulls you don’t want to count individually, you can use X to say you don’t know. Also you can enter a general group like “gull sp.” if you can’t quite identify which kind of seagull they are)
Oh yeah, I use those features, what I want is to be able to isolate specific calls and store that exact sound clip along with pictures I took to try and keep track of individual birds that visit regularly.
Welcome to your forties, where bird fascination is a right of passage! XD
I haven't got 36 yet so don't you go putting those extra years in me!
To me, Merlin is the shining example of what "a computer in everyone's pocket" could have been. Such an amazing app that connects so many people more intimately with the world around them.
I get occasional nudges to support their organization, but it's a clear and direct appeal, there are no dark patterns that I'm aware of.
iNaturalist is another gem. Hackers please support these apps so they don’t turn into the AllTrails and Couchsurfing type rackets that we deserve.
Merlin is run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, so it should (hopefully!) remain good and free, unlike apps by private companies with a profit motive.
With all of the federal cuts to university funding I'm not sure this is a given.
I'm currently building out a tool to aggregate and also allow for submitting back to inaturalist, it's so great!
Yes! It's a rare example of an app that instead of trying to capture your attention into a virtual environment, helps you to direct it outwards into the real world.
The sound id in particular is just an amazing way to really extend what's possible for most people, and provides an on-ramp for people to identify more birds by ear alone (and in general to pay more attention to sound when in nature).
I might argue that Merlin — and especially eBird — lean a bit to heavily to the competitive "high scores" view of birding; given the impact of climate change on bird populations, encouraging people to travel the world and see as many species as possible is clearly problematic.
But that's a minor quibble, and Merlin remains one of the few apps I'd unconditionally recommend to anyone with the faintest chance they'd use it.
I'm friends with some of the researchers on the Sound ID portion of this app! The team's gone to great lengths to make sure the machine learning models and evals are solid.
Under the hood, Sound ID is a great example of how "domain-expert-driven" careful research can give more reliable results than just feeding in data and hoping for the best.
I would like to see a version of the app that assigns names, as in 'Fred', 'Bertha', 'Kevin' to given birds, algorithmically. I get the same birds in my garden and I already know what species they are, but, I wouldn't mind knowing if my favourite birds have got new mates, or, if I am down the road, some way from home, to confirm that it is 'Kevin' that I see, as in the same 'Kevin' that frequents my bird bath.
Consistently assigning names to different blackbirds might be tricky, but, for other birds, I am sure that some AI algorithm could do this.
I'm definitely impressed with the sound ID. One time there was a cacophony of birds singing outside my house at varying distances, and the app was able to identify 6 different bird species within 30 seconds. All 6 suggestions seemed reasonable to me.
We sometimes joke it's hallucinating when it detects something unexpected, but often it was being accurate. I saw my first ever male Blackburnian Warbler a couple weeks ago after Merlin picked it up.
I’m really impressed about how well the sound ID works for birds doing mimicry.
We had a brown thrasher stringing together a long series of mimicked calls that got labeled correctly as a brown thrasher.
I don’t even know how you’d approach the ML for that seeing how unique each song is to each bird
Equally so I've had a red wing black bird mimic a cardinal and it appeared as a cardinal.
The waveform was too thick and looked funky which is why I tracked down the bird doing it. (I Was at the Ohio bird sanctuary)
Pass them my thanks. I've been using the Sound ID on dog walks for a few years now and I love it. It's made me much more interested in the birds around me now, and if it tags a new bird that I've not come across before I'll often try to spot it. I think I'm a bird spotter now.
Someone near my house has a rooster that does his thing every morning. And every morning I look at the app hoping to see him pop up in the ID list but alas, it never IDs him.
Please Let your friends know that roosters are birds too and deserve their recognition as the world's wake up call! Lol
I was really impressed when I took a trip to England and it recognized european birds. At one point it said there was a Rose-ringed Parakeet which seemed totally wrong, but then we saw a bunch of them in Hyde park a couple days later.
The iOS app did seem to lock up when trying to download the region packs though. I should find out where to file a bug!
I'd love an API of some sort. I have some birdwatching/tracking ideas that require I can id a bird by sound and Merlin would be the best route if they just let people us it ...
For that you want to use BirdNet:
https://birdnet.cornell.edu/api/
https://birdnet.cornell.edu/
Merlin is trained on the same source as BirdNet.
You can also use the iNaturalist API for visual ids, for what it's worth.
https://www.inaturalist.org
It is amazing, but it does often give false positives. That probably can't be avoided, though
I like how the app shows reference calls/songs for detected birds so I can verify using my own judgement, or to figure out which birds are which when there's a lot of chirping going on.
It does work pretty well. Great for non line-of-sight birding.
Care to share any anecdotes? I can imagine some pretty interesting conversations about their work.
Merlin is magic. Love the app
It’s so great this app is getting attention. Hopefully the devs/PMs come here and pay attention.
The sound ID works very well, especially in the jungles/forests of Colombia with zero network availability.
The rest of the app needs a lot of love, though. Buttons don’t work often, screens are inconsistent, results get lost, and more issues.
Features: I’d love an iNaturalist bridge. Going back into a previous recording shows “No matches” when the original capture did. Many times we’re with groups in nature, and we ID something, but it’s gone by the time we show it to someone.
A quick starting point would be to add a quick feedback button vs opening a web form, so issues can be reported conveniently.
And a resounding thank you to everyone making this app possible!
> Buttons don’t work often, screens are inconsistent, results get lost, and more issues.
What device are you using, out of curiosity? I use this app almost daily for months at a time across several generations of the Google Pixel, I haven't had any of these issues even one time. I'm not even sure what you mean by "we ID something, but it’s gone by the time we show it to someone". Like, it shows a match while you're recording, but the ID disappears after you've stopped the recording?
I've found the app starts hiccuping when I'm making a very long recording, but I've learned to just cut it off and start a new one after about 10 minutes.
Going to second this opinion. I use this app almost daily as well on an iPhone 15 Pro. I have zero problems with responsiveness. I have seen a small lag when I start to get to 45m-1hr recordings, but even that isn't all too bad.
The only problem I had was when I had a OnePlus phone. It would show the little circles of "I found a bird" but not actually identify anything, and as far as I know it was a OnePlus specific bug. I have a Pixel now, and it works perfectly.
When I was in Aruba there was no bird pack which covered the island, but the one for Venezuela seemed to work for most birds that I heard.
> I've found the app starts hiccuping when I'm making a very long recording, but I've learned to just cut it off and start a new one after about 10 minutes.
What phone are you using? I record ten hours a day and never get any issues whatsoever, so I'm not even sure what you mean by "hiccups".
Not them, but I had it crash on a three hour recording.
Works very well on my iPhone as well.
> The sound ID works very well, especially in the jungles/forests of Colombia with zero network availability.
Interesting. I find that the sound ID works well if:
- I have my phone out of my pocket and exposed to the air (obviously, if the microphone is muffled, it may cause problems).
- I'm not moving (my footsteps seem to interfere no matter how loud the bird is)
- The Merlin App is running with "focus" (i.e., if Merlin sound ID is running in the background, it seems less likely to detect songs and calls). I don't know if this is really true or if I have a subconscious bias.
- There are also weird effects where it will sometimes fail to notice really loud obvious birds nearby (e.g., baltimore orioles directly above me) but it will nail a faint and distant song.
It would also be nice if it could show the part of the sonogram that forms the basis of its ID call. It is especially difficult for me to examine a sonogram when there are multiple birds singing at once.
> The rest of the app needs a lot of love, though. Buttons don’t work often, screens are inconsistent, results get lost, and more issues.
I have the opposite experience, but that may be a phone-specific issue??
Nevertheless, it's a fantastic app.
Love the app!
But it crashes for me every 255 seconds after start-up on Android. Yes, I timed it.
Is there a way to submit bug reports?
Android app store says merlinhelp@cornell.edu
Definitely submit full OS and hardware details, and adb logcat crash logs if you can. There's a million possibilities of the cause of the problem, with all the different android hardware out there.
That's a really funny sounding bug. I'm curious what's causing that!
I tried adding a 2nd region when I was in Europe and it locked up. I had to reinstall the app to get it back to a usable state. Adding region packs is totally broken on iOS.
Be careful when playing the bird songs. A few days ago I clicked on the cardinal song that was in my identification list and the male cardinal nesting in my hedge went NUTS and I’ve not seen either of them since, and used to see them daily. They’re very territorial.
I’m afraid that I scared them away from an active nest by accident just playing around with the app. :(
"Calling back" is a term I heard after getting into birding. I don't think they warn the user in the app enough about "Please don't use this to call to birds, only listen for your own reference".
If I were a bird, and another mysterious bird sound came that was speaking a certain feeling or phrase I could understand, and I come to see it's a giant monkey man playing the sounds from himself, I would probably move my family, too.
Yes, Cardinals are pretty territorial and chase each other out. Esp during nesting.
Whether it's whistling close to their tones, "Pishing" to get their attention, or playing sounds from phones, all of it interrupts their normal behavior. Cars, trucks, lawnmowers, motorcycles all mess with them too.
https://www.sibleyguides.com/2011/04/the-proper-use-of-playb...
>When song is played in a bird’s territory, that bird’s response to the “intruder” is watched attentively by neighboring males and by females. In one study (Mennill et al 2002) high-ranking male Black-capped Chickadees exposed to aggressive playback lost status as their mates and neighbors apparently perceived them as losers, unable to drive away the phantom intruder.
It's clear we're capable of mimicking their language with our devices and playing it back to them has potential consequences to breaking up a family of birds.
I have "butt Merlined" a few times...
Each time, I think to myself ... That bird is CLOSE! Let me take my phone out of my pocket and see if Merlin knows what it is ... DAMMNIT!
Of interest:
> Sound ID is trained on audio recordings that are first converted to visual representations (spectrograms), then analyzed using computer vision tools similar to those that power Photo ID.
Yeah, the spectrogram scrolling by at the top isn't just a cute gimmick, that's actually how the recognition works...
The spectrogram is actually also really handy for manual ID, and (at least for me) in remembering calls.
Neat.
When working in a linguistics lab as an undergraduate long ago, we looked at spectrograms to identify sounds (specifically places of articulation) as much as listened to recordings.
So it makes some sense to build a model on them rather than some other representation of the sound.
most audio NNs work on spectrograms
I've been birdwatching (birding?) actively for a few years now, but only this year did I start using these sound identifiers. What a boon it's been! I've already spotted over a dozen new species by sound alone, and also learned to identify some of them by myself.
It really has opened up a whole new venue of enjoying this hobby. At least here, machine learning/AI has a clear, positive impact.
In general as a bird watcher i’ve been extremely impressed by this tech. I generally trust it.
There’s only a couple of times i’ve been sceptical of it’s id and thats where there’s similar species in the area. Eg. I’m not convinced there really is a purple finch where i live when all i see is house finches all day. But i could be wrong too! It’s proven itself enough that i’m not ready to call it wrong on that one.
It definitely has trouble with similar species sometimes — I've noticed it recently with crows and warblers. But it does a great job generally and direct observation of the bird usually clears up the confusion.
I have a bunch of Blue Jays around my house and it turns out they are so good at imitating a specific hawk species(blanking on its name) that Merlin actually reports it as the hawk! I went and listened to real recordings of that hawks call and I couldn't tell it apart from the Jays imitation call.
Now, I know it's technically possible it was a real id, but Im pretty sure the bald eagle it detected was actually one of the kids down the street running around screaming lol
Surely your local blujays must have heard the hawk somewhere in order to learn its call? It figures that a hawk would occasionally show up in your neighborhood.
Machine identification can still need some manual confirmation, even though this app does a really good job. It’s not a confirmed sighting until you have a visual confirmation.
There definitely are hawks all around my area.
In this case, while I couldn't see it directly while he was making the call, I had watched him fly to and land in a nearby tree before the call and then shortly after watched it take off. So I can't be 100% sure, but I'd be willing to bet that it was the Jay.
The only errors I've seen it make with common birds in the UK are also with finches - specifically with the greenfinch's "at rest" twitter, which it consistently mistakes for a goldfinch.
The two are visually distinctive but, in Merlin's defence, I can't tell them apart by ear either!
I love this app. I use it all the time.
But I do have a complaint, that you can't upload an image via the web from your PC. For those of us who use a DSLR for our birding photos, the UX to have to transfer images to our phone to send them through the app is really painful.
It isn't the end of the world. It just makes me ID my birds in other ways. But it would be nice to provide non-mobile UX options.
I'm the author of the Birder framework (a computer vision toolkit for bird classification) - https://gitlab.com/birder/birder It's still in early alpha, but you might find it useful for your DSLR workflow.
If you're interested in trying a web-based alternative, I have a demo space at https://huggingface.co/spaces/birder-project/birder-image-cl... where you can upload images directly from your browser. Fair warning though - it's primarily designed to showcase the models rather than provide any kind of user experience, so you'll need to manually select the appropriate regional model (look for suffixes like eu-common, arabian-peninsula, etc. based on where your photos were taken).
The coverage is still very limited... More regions will follow in the coming months.
thanks for linking, I'm very excited for this--it's always saddened me that the public Merlin models are limited to the ones they've released for competitions that are now many years out of date.
my use case is adding tags to my Lightroom library with identified species.
I also use a dslr for my bird pics. When it comes time to id the bird I take a picture of my monitor and feed that to the app. The app doesn’t need my 48MP images to do the job. The screenshot is fine.
Clever. I like it, and will definitely try that. Thanks!
The analog loophole copy/paste :D
I do the same thing, but I only ID photos that I consider good enough to post, once posted they're accessible from my phone (Flickr, IG, et al) so it's no big deal to grab them and insert them into the app.
We have a Mockingbird in our backyard (or more precisely, we live in his/her territory) that impersonates a Gila woodpecker. We were able to record it. Playing back the video and using Bird ID actually shows it as a Gila Woodpecker.
Oh, that's not my experience at all! I downloaded this app to see how many distinct songs a mockingbird was singing one time (it was a lot) and the app just came back: "Mockingbird". I was both amazed and disappointed!
I have a Blue Jay that began imitating a Cooper's Hawk after one started showing up in the neighborhood. In its early attempts at imitation, it was still recognized as a Blue Jay, but the Blue Jay has improved and it now comes up as a Cooper's Hawk! I watch it sing, so I know this is the Blue Jay, not the hawk.
Same here, I was really surprised that it could see through the mimicry.
Loving these kind of apps :-) I personally use WhoBird, which runs complete local on your android device, so it works also when you don't have internet and is available on fdroid (https://f-droid.org/packages/org.woheller69.whobird/). Will give merlin a shot as well to see how it compares
Merlin also works offline. I use it all the time out in the mountains.
AFAIK WhoBird uses the same model (or at least, also developed by Cornell), but for me, Merlin is still better at identifying multiple birds at once.
whoBird is only working with audio (and not photos) though
I would love for someone to make a birding/citizen scientist app that's well gamified. This is basically pokemon. You go places and find different creatures and collect them.
[eBird](https://ebird.org/home) has exactly what you are looking for:
- https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ebird-by-cornell-lab-ornitho...
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.cornell.bi...
Even merlin does some of it:
https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/download/
For those interested in birdwatching, I also recommend checking a web app: https://adsb.exposed/?dataset=Birds
Explanation: https://clickhouse.com/blog/birds
I would love to play that game, and the data could maybe be useful for researchers.
On the other hand, people playing Pokemon GO trespassed private property and protected spaces, so I wonder how far would the players of this game go just to make a pic of a "legendary" animal at the border of extinction.
iNaturalist is great for logging observations (their iNat Next app is their new one).
They also have an app called Seek that I think is more aimed at kids, but it comes with trophies and streaks and stuff like that.
Seek is impressive just for the sheer number of completely different things it could identify, from mosses to animals. I used it to find native and invasive plants in my garden.
I had the same idea a few years ago. Would be really great.
If you haven't tried birding, try it. You'll like it. It's like collecting Pokemon, but IRL.
This is exactly the metaphor I use for this app! It's great.
I've used Merlin for years and it works great most of the time. Agree with others that it's a great example of something we should all have on the tiny computers in our pockets.
Until this thread I didn't realise it did photo ID! I took a photo of a black redstart last year and at the time was able to identify it via photos uploaded to social media. But I just tried the app and it got it straight away. It also added it as a new 'lifer' because I hadn't previously logged it via audio ID. Cool!
I was thinking of trying to run this at home: https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go
Highly recommend it. The kids and I have really playing with the data. https://birdymusic.com/
It's very nice, I prefer it to Birdnet-pi. It's been running very well for a few months now. It's cool to see the daily and seasonal changes in the detections.
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.woheller69.whobird
I have been running this for about 1 year, works very well. The developer is regularly updating it and I run the nightly image at the moment.
Go for it. Running it for quite some time at home. Very easy to deploy, regular updates.
Love this app.
I never thought I would ever actively watch for birds when I hear them. Or that I would be able to say "this is clearly a Wren". Or that I have a my favourite bird (Wren as well btw).
This is the first time I’ve heard of this kind of app, and it honestly sounds like a little piece of magic. You just hold up your phone, and it tells you which bird is singing nearby. There are often birds outside my window some I know, some I don’t. I used to just wonder quietly, but now it feels like I might finally get some answers. Especially when I’m out in nature and see those beautiful birds with long tails it’d be great to finally know their names. Also, when my kid asks me “What bird is that?” I might finally have an actual answer instead of just guessing. I think I’ll try it out one morning. Even recognizing just one new bird might make my whole walk feel different.
This app changed my life. I got into hiking and outdoor spaces when I married my wife and she wanted me to join her in camping, something I never did as a kid. This iteratively got me more into natural spaces and wildlife, but only as a passing curiosity.
But then one morning while camping, I woke up to a symphony of birdsong. Many calls, but there were at least dozens of a call echoing throughout the forest of a flute-like bird with a trill at the end. I was enchanted. I had used the Merlin app previously just to ID some city birds near my house, but I remembered I had it and found that dozens of wood thrushes were singing their song to me that morning. It's my favorite sound in the world, I've got a tattoo on my arm of the spectrogram of their song, and I make it a point to camp where I expect them to sing every year.
This created a journey into a love and personal involvement in the natural world that has changed me for the better.
That's a lovely story. Thanks for sharing!
Yeah I use it almost everyday. I've gotten to where I frequently recognize new birds. I don't talk about it much because I haven't fully come to terms with entering a bird watching phase of my life, but occasionally I'll say something like "Oh that Northern Flicker is back" and my wife will be totally confused. We live in Brooklyn near Prospect Park and have a backyard so we get a pretty wide range of birds.
I'm on the other side of the continent and a Northern Flicker is the loudest bird outside my window right now :)
(Also identified with Merlin.)
I’ve used it for several years now, and can’t recommend it enough. It does feel like magic :)
BirdNET-PI[0] may be of interest to this crowd. It uses a Raspberry Pi with a microphone to identify birds continuously based on their calls.
[0] https://www.birdweather.com/birdnetpi
In particular, it makes nocmig drastically more approachable. Be warned, though, that the false positive rate is extremely high (which is to be expected).
Fantastic app. My wife and I are gradually becoming able to recognise more and more birds by their call. This is great because the human ear is better than the app at rejecting environmental noise - so we can spot birds by their call even close to a noisy road when the app cannot.
The app, at least on my Pixel 6, struggles with very high frequency calls - e.g. long-tailed tits.
My best spot yet? A nightingale in Wimbledon.
I find it great for familiar birds that only make certain calls when they are less visible and others out in the open. Let's you connect the variety of sounds throughout the day to specific species.
I feel like we share interests and location. The long-tailed tits in Wimbledon present no trouble for Merlin my Samsung phone, but I've never seen a nightingale round here.
My best spot yet was also a nightingale in Spain. I imagine the UK is even better for bird spotting.
This app has been great. I've used it a lot to identify the birds that inhabit my back yard.
I tried using it in New Zealand last year, and it wasn't as effective as in the US: I think it hasn't been trained as well on the native New Zealand birds, many of which aren't found anywhere else.
Amusingly, it identified turkeys when we were in New Zealand, which I was irritated with because there clearly weren't any turkeys in New Zealand. It turned out I was wrong when we came across a flock of them in the Waikato area running around in a sheep field. A local told me that they were brought there around a hundred years ago and are mostly left alone because nobody eats turkey in New Zealand.
It's worth being aware that the developer of the Android app asserts that "...this app doesn't share user data with other companies or organizations" but according to Exodus Privacy this is not true: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.labs.me...
Exodus can only show what code is likely included, not what data is sent out. For example I'd classify a crash stacktrace without any extra information as not sharing user data. Exodus doesn't contradict the authors, but they could specify what the services are used for.
I love this app and use it every few days. The Macaulay Library at Cornell, where this app is made/supported, has a short write up on the underlying tech here: https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/2021/06/22/behind-the-scenes...
Note that the recent iOS update seems to have introduced a bug whereby even after stopping recording, the app in the background will continue to use SIGNIFICANT battery life, so I've needed to start force-closing the app after using it.
It did that for me a while back but seems better now, I had hoped it was fixed…
I installed it for the first time four days ago after being told about it by a relative...
My father is in his 80’s, has poor hearing aids, but still goes out daily with his dSLR and Merlin to see what’s around him and he still gets great shots. I’m really happy Merlin exists.
Another parent in my kid's Cub Scout pack told me about this a few years ago. It's been really cool to use on camping trips, and lately I've been using it while walking the dog. There's a lot more different types of birds around me than I had realized.
If you're interested in this, https://www.birdweather.com/ is a kinda neat automated sound-based bird ID and tracker in a nice little package. I'm not involved with it in any way, I've just seen it around recently and I'm interested in this space. You might also like Wildlife Sound Recording Society (WSRS) https://www.wildlife-sound.org/
We use this! With BirdNET-Pi gifted some to a couple of friends too!
We configured it so it send me real time alerts when uncommon birds are detected.
I identified a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-whiskered_bulbul in our garden thanks to this amazing app! Me and my wife love birding and at the end of the year we compare our scores, it is playful entertainment. And we are introducing our daughter to it, it is so cute when she identifies one!
My favorite part of the app is the spectrogram - I'm not sure exactly why but seeing the songs has made learning which bird goes with which song so much easier.
Also a shout out here to Bird Song Hero: https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/bird-song-hero/
Great app. One improvement I'd like is that if you play back sounds from the app you are allowed to cast the sound to an external speaker. I cannot.
I wish when I uploaded a photo for analysis, and the app identifies my bird, that I could keep MY photo and not the generic one in their database. It's great at building a checklist, but not so much for making it feel like my own.
If you use the companion app called ebird, you can save your checklists. Later you can upload your photos and any audio you have recorded. Those get vetted by regional bird experts and get added to the scientific data. It's fun to go back and relive past hikes and trips viewing your pictures on the ebird.org website!
Have you considered the Vögelschublade method? https://i.insider.com/638a7310b4290800185d0c43?width=1300&fo...
On the Android app, tap the share button at the top of the recording play screen. This lets you export the audio WAV file. Select some other audio player app to share to, such as Podcast Addict, and use that app's Cast feature once it opens.
I wish the recordings could be edited, it would be nice to record for several minutes and just pull out the actual bird calls.
I recently found this app and I'm loving it. I actively use this when i go for walk, hike and camping. Thanks team for the amazing work
Me too. I was out hiking and ran into an old guy I know. He is 90 years old and he's a bird biologist and a naturalist by vocation. I changed my plans for the day and hiked with him for a few hours. He talked quite a bit about birds and ecology and it sparked my interest. I figured someone must've made an app to id bird calls, and I found Merlin in the Google store. Now I've been walking around trying to id every bird I hear. That was a few days ago, so seeing it here on HN is definitely a Baader–Meinhof moment.
I love this app, but after going back to review some of the rare birds I’ve noticed that many of my saved recordings have inexplicably disappeared.
I do wish it could also identify other insects/animals. I originally got the app to identify whatever bird sounded like a squeaky door or wooden swing, and eventually saw that it was a squirrel.
I'm a regular user, and I highly recommend it. / Here are some things that I'm not clear on (admittedly because I haven't researched them yet):
1. Are recordings shared with Cornell? By default?
2. Is it "recommended" or "expected" that I try to get a visual id on the birds, too?
I'm also a regular user.
Q1: To my knowledge for the merlin app, no. Just local storage to your phone as a WAV file.
Q2: If you've started down the path of using Merlin, there is a companion app from the Cornell group called ebird. It used GPS to list birding Hotspot near your location. You can keep track of what you've seen. If you want to get extra verification on your sightings you can upload pictures and audio files at a later time on the ebird website. Real live humans, volunteer birding experts, will verify your sightings. I've gotten to meet some very knowledgeable birders through this process. All of this data goes into scientific research. On the ebird website the have specific protocols on what make for a good observation. It is my understanding that submitted and vetted photos and audio files will make it into the NN models used by the Merlin app.
Happy birding to everyone!
I also recommend Seek and iNaturalist, a similar pair of apps for many kinds of life (plants, fungi, animals, insects, etc). Seek relies on camera instead of microphone to make IDs.
This app is awesome. The only minor complaint I have is that it does not handle long recordings well. For example, I left my phone near the window for an hour to identify as many birds as possible and the recording cannot finalize properly due to (supposedly) huge size of the produced file.
WhoBird is much better for this, as it's realtime and processed on-device. It stores a log of each bird identified along with the percentage match, and can optionally store a clip of the audio that triggered the match.
Is WhoBird Android-only? Not finding it in the iPhone App Store?
yes, it is an android version of birdNET as stated on the github page https://github.com/woheller69/whoBIRD
I've been using this for years - amazing while traveling.
I wish they'd add some non-bird noises to it as a courtesy since there are often whips and calls that are non birds, like insects or mammals. I think it would add some depth and the overhead shouldn't be too high.
As an amateur bird photographer I love this app, but I wish there was some way to pinpoint the direction the sound is coming from.
I have wondered if perhaps with 3 microphones positioned a specific distance apart from one another, an app could compare their relative volumes and show the user the exact location of a bird. Any smart HNers know if something like this is possible?
> I have wondered if perhaps with 3 microphones positioned a specific distance apart from one another, an app could compare their relative volumes and show the user the exact location of a bird.
I am no expert, but I do know that this is possible. It's called acoustic location [1].
> Civilian uses include locating wildlife and locating the shooting position of a firearm.
As to how spaced out the microphones would have to be and to what accuracy the location can be determined, I cannot say (but my guess would be "pretty accurate").
Another interesting challenge would be to determine the location of multiple birds in different locations. Perhaps isolating specific bird calls with some ML model and then acoustic-locating that specific call. I can imagine the application showing which bird is calling from where in 3D.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_location
Didn't realize they had a photo ID now. I've been using it for sound id all the time.
The photo id function correctly and quickly identified the house finch hatchlings in my backyard spider plant nest when ChatGPT or Claude could not.
I really love Merlin as a hobbyist nature photographer. Not just the sound ID, but even more importantly it has a wonderful function that allows you to visually ID a bird from a photo. I don't know much about birds, other than having an appreciation at a distance and finding them photogenic, and Merlin has helped me learn a lot about the birds I've photographed as well as identifying them. This is one of the most important apps on my phone. One of the best things I've seen come out to the public from academia.
Its awesome to see the Cornell Lab of Ornithology continue its work in this way. I first heard of it through seeing mention of the "Haikubox" which is a self-contained BirdNet device. In looking it up I see that there is another commercial device and a DIY Raspberry based hardware. All are reviewed at the below link:
https://becausebirds.com/bird-auto-id-showdown-comparing-bio...
BirdNET-Go is nice, it runs on any linux box (raspi included) and can also analyze RTSP streams, so you can just connect any security camera audio you may already have outside.
Love this app. You don't have to be a professional birdwatcher (if that's a profession) to use it. Just open it, and start listening. It's really fun to see what kind of variety of birds around you.
I love this app, it's incredibly good on the Sound ID stuff. There is a Wildlife Trust nature reserve near where I live and I've found it incredibly useful to work out what I'm hearing/looking at.
Love this app. It’s really made me realize how little bird diversity there is in the suburbs where I live.
I opened it up in a natural research area once and it lit up with so many more species than I’d ever heard near my house.
Discovered this app a year ago and love it. Use it almost everytime I'm out on a walk or a bike ride. Glad to see it's getting some love here. I echo the sentiments of another commenter that said it's the shining example of what "a computer in everyone's pocket" could have been.
Merlin is far less capable in developing countries either because there’s less available crowdsourced data, or it’s intentionally suppressed to reduce its use by unskilled poachers
I won Merlin once. I didn't know you could win the game, but I was relaxing in my backyard and suddenly it notified me that I had found the merlin. I was so excited. I hadn't known that a merlin was a kind of bird.
I do wonder how accurate Merlin is. I certainly can't tell the bird calls apart, and I don't usually spot the bird in question, so it could just be lying to me half the time, and I'd probably never notice. But I sure do love the app as an amateur bird-liker.
Fellow amateur bird-liker here. Usually when you ID a bird it’ll provide you with a boatload of other recordings you can compare against if you’re unsure.
You can also use these recordings to annoy birds. Play their species' song and the bird will think there's a competitor nearby, and sometimes fly close to confront the interloper.
Needless to say, don't do this too much, but it can be useful for getting a visual on certain birds (like warblers).
Berlin's Museum of Natural History (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin) has a nice app for identifying plants and animals called Naturblick. It's available in English.
https://www.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/en/research/naturbli...
Love it. I do very occasional birdwatching, so I still don’t know most of the birds I meet. What I like about Bird ID is that when I see in binoculars a singing bird I can quickly identify it, check photos, and really confirm that it’s exactly that bird.
I’ve heard from more experienced birdwatchers that it can false identify in some cases, so I always try to confirm visually, but anyway, for my casual use it’s more than accurate enough.
Amazing... I have the same idea for car sounds! You know, when different cars make random noise here and there, and you don't see what's wrong!
That would need more metadata, the car sound app would need to know a lot of specifics about the car, so it's likely not as "easy"
Good idea, let me know if you want me to contribute VW Caddy loose turbo whine. :D
The Sound ID is amazing. Been using it for a few years now. I usually just keep it on while I'm hiking and it identifies over a dozen birds in 20-30min, nearly all of which I've eventually verified are in the area.
The photo ID feature is okay, but I assume that's because the photos I take on my phone of far away birds is too pixelated.
I actually want a similar ID feature frog species; i hear a lot of croaking
I normally use BirdNet app for birdsong, and it looks like that is from Cornell as well. Does Merlin use the same tech under the covers?
I don’t believe so. Merlin is newer and uses a different architecture. BirdNet uses a CNN and its atomic sound units are 3 seconds long: Merlin can do real-time ID on continuous audio and I think uses a hybrid system.
I tried this yesterday and set it up for my wife. I was amazed at how many birds it picked up. There must be some amazing technology in the audio processing.
My <2yo son started excitedly pointing out birds flying by a kitchen window at home so we placed a feeder on the glass and he loves when they eat while he's eating. Then I found this app to start to try and identify the different frequent diners together. Was amazed at how well it worked even through the screen on the window.
I love Merlin! It's worth noting that some of its early funding was provided by the National Science Foundation: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1010818
This app is super useful to me because I'm always hearing new bird calls—from eagles and hawks to starlings and, yes, even the crows. It even motivated me to crate a BirdNET-PI (recognizing birds by sound). I highly recommend this app.
To folks in the Finger Lakes, the lab that makes the app regularly posts tech jobs on Cornell.edu, though that is likely impacted by Cornell's current hiring freeze.
Not reading just to say it is amazing and use it every time I know I will hear bird. It is even on my bed side so I can check any unusual bird during the morning bird session.
This has been great, it helped me ID an Osprey, I was where I didn't think they'd be.
Its ID'd a Peregrine Falcon twice, I've still not seen it.
It does list Red Kites as Common Buzzards, I am not sure how to provide feedback to update this.
I tend to use Merlin, and Seek as I walk around Essex. Seek doesn't seem to know about Sessile Oaks.
I really like this app, but last night I had an encounter in the dark with the most weird alien sounding bird, that uses so low frequencies that the app couldnt make anything out of it.
I realize this is a fault of my phones mic and not the app, btw!
I think the bird was one of the snipes (dvärgbeckasin?) because I met them before.
Did you actually see the bird? Some animals make sounds that are deceptively similar to birds (ex chipmunk chirps). Merlin won’t recognize these as “not a bird”; it just doesn’t recognize the sound at all.
Usual disclaimer IANABL (I am not a bird lawyer)
Nope, but I heard the sound before and I am at least 70% confident after asking my ornitholog friend :-)
We don't have a huge load of animals making weird sounds around here, so one learns to recognize most of the strange ones after some years in the woods.
I use BirdNET, which is also from Cornell. Supposedly BirdNET has a larger data set.
I'd love to know the backstory behind having multiple apps.
Does anyone have BirdNet running on generic x86 hardware? Or is it just for Raspberry Pi?
You mean BirdNet-Pi? That's just for a Raspi, but have a look at the above mentioned BirdNet-Go, that runs on any Linux box.
The guy you replied to probably was talking about the BirdNet Android/iOS app, which also identifies birds by sound, similar to Merlin.
I've been using it for a few years now just to identify the local (Arizona) birds in my neighborhood. It was also fun to use it when I was in South Dakota last year. I've gotten most of my family interested in the same, just through use of the app
Big fan of this app! It makes it so easy for the beginner bird watcher to immediately get results. Sound ID is mostly what I spend my time in.
I do find myself wishing Sound ID would identify additional wildlife beyond birds. Anyone heard of such a project?
Another app I enjoy is Seek by iNaturalist!
I love this. It used to work like magic but something happened and now it barely recognizes birds for me. Only if they are really close. Anyone else? Maybe my hardware is failing? I also travelled and loaded other packs and wonder if I messed up my DB.
I noticed it had a hard time when there was a consistent background noise going. If my home's AC is running, it can only ID the highest pitched birds and will fail to detect the lower pitched calls.
I've actually started setting my AC to keep the temp a little higher in the early mornings so it doesn't run as much while I'm outside.
A few months ago, there was an update that made the detection much stricter. I believe this was in part to detract people from posting false positives of rare birds to eBird.
Could be an issue with your mic (clogged? weak connection?). I just installed and used it and the app works perfectly for me and picks up birds that are calling faintly and in the distance.
I was wondering what kind of bird was chirping outside my window this morning. I should have had this app.
I don't know anything about birds but it seems to be very accurate for the ones that I can also visually compare.
The only one I've seen it misidentify is a starling but apparently those are excellent mimics so I don't blame the app.
I was visiting Yosemite a year-ish ago and a guide recommended this app and it was fantastic. My kids also loved getting the real-time info on what they were hearing, and trying to spot the various kinds of birds.
Strongly recommend it (though admittedly, I don't use it often in suburbia)
My 7 year old loves this app. He was running around the yard and going on walks with me like he was catching pokemon. He is not yet aware of Pokemon Go. I prefer he become a bird nerd in the short term if I can manage. Really cool stuff.
Amazing technology. Sometimes I wish they would gamify this tech, or make it into a social activity. A kind of 'pokemon go' for birdwatching. It would be a great opportunity to get people more interested in nature and conservation.
Beautiful functional website, I got hooked from that last woodpecker post that ended up on HN.
A wonderful app that's helped me learn about so many birds!
It is surprising that this app can mistake the human voice/whistles for some birds (try hooting like an owl or whistling like a sparrow/starling)!
Wonderful app! Collecting birds is great fun and another fun use is to try and fool it by making my own bird noises and see if I can pass. Red-tailed hawk is my speciality. I can fool it ≈50% of the time once I’m warmed up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizz_%28birding%29
I have been using it for a year since we bought a small farm. I donated to support them just last month. Great app. Only thing I see trip it up is mockingbirds.
Love this app, saw a guide using this app on an early morning birdsong walk—gave it a try and it's really good. Very accurate and super easy to use.
I think a lot of serious bird enthusiasts use this in the UK.
I can't even select woodpeckers because apparently they're not supposed to live here? Not even a way to turn off that filter. Woodpeckers are very common here
The only app I have that I actually like. It's great.
I love this app. I let it run in the background when I walk my dogs at home and when I'm traveling and it is amazing how well it connects me with the world around me.
I love this app!! This and iSeek (plant/animal identification via photos) are a blast. Lived in the jungle in souteast Mexico the last couple years and I'm constantly reaching for these.
I know there are many apps for plant identification but does anyone have a recommendation for a good one?
(iSeek mentioned in another comment doesn't seem to be available on iOS where I live)
Try Pl@antNet, https://plantnet.org/en/ Seek is nice as it's all on device and works offline, but I think Pl@ntNet is better for identification.
Seek by inaturalist
Second this rec, it is very good, and will do a pretty nice job with mushrooms as well (although never trust it as a sole ID if you’re foraging).
I recently discovered after years of using this app that it's possible to have the names of the birds in other languages than English, it's an option in the app settings.
I’ve used this app for a while, it’s really good and I’d highly recommend it if you want to learn more about the birds where you live in an accessible way.
This XKCD is ten years old:
https://xkcd.com/1425/
It didn't take the full ten years, though Merlin has gone from "pretty good" to "amazing" in the last few.
Would love this for my Meta Ray Bans and generally have wanted this for all animal sounds heard on hikes and elsewhere.
My wife and I learnt to do a bird call with our hands, the app actually identified it as a type of dove, we were very surprised
I really wish this existed for web as well. Why do I have to transfer photos to my phone in order to run ID on them?
I love this app for bird sounds. I found ChatGPT is pretty accurate for pictures of birds or plants as well.
I'll try that. I like Seek by iNaturalist for plants and mushrooms. Still looking for better performance on trees.
Great app!
In my experience, it works pretty well in Europe, but so so in East Asia (doesn't know many birds there).
Used it a couple of nights ago to find out that here in Berlin we have a massive Nightingale population
Does this have ads? What is the Schibsted tracker for?
It does not have ads. They will put up a notification 2 or 3 times a year for global non paid bird events.
The GPS location is used by the model to narrow search results.
It’s great to see it works globally and not just in America
I really wish this existed for web as well.
Birdnet let's you upload audio files to analyze, if that's what you mean. https://birdnet.cornell.edu/
I've been using Merlin (Pokemon GO for adults if you will) for a few months now. It's been pushing me to be outside more, explore, and be active in general. The social aspect is great too. I have friends who share when they come across a new one that we haven't seen in the area before. Kudos to the program.
Also so not sorry to throw off the algorithm at a local aviary identifying birds from tropical parts of the world.
Using this one quite often :)
I'm a little disappointed that the photo on the landing page isn't, you know, a merlin [1].
[1] https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/merlin/id
This was only 10 years ago https://xkcd.com/1425/
Is it just me or am I right to be disappointed that the home page doesn't seem to have a merlin anywhere?
Then I opened the app and my 'bird of the day' was a merlin.
love this app
iNaturalist is yet another nice app
And for birdsong there is specifically BirdNET, operating on a similar principle as this.
I might check out Merlin specifically just for the ID wizard, for raptors which are pain to photograph and are best IDd by shilouette.
Interesting to note that Merlin and BirdNET are both through Cornell Labs...
Came here for this. My wife is a big Merlin fan, but I'm pretty hard of hearing and much more visually-orientated when it comes to the natural world. INat is a fantastic project, I've learned so much through it.