Merlin Bird ID by Cornell Lab

Cornell Lab of Ornithology

About this app

What's that bird? Ask Merlin—the world’s leading app for birds. Just like magic, Merlin Bird ID will help you solve the mystery.

Merlin Bird ID helps you identify birds you see and hear. Merlin is unlike any other bird app—it's powered by eBird, the world’s largest database of bird sightings, sounds, and photos.

Merlin offers four fun ways to identify birds. Answer a few simple questions, upload a photo, record a singing bird, or explore birds in a region.

Whether you’re curious about a bird you’ve seen once or you’re hoping to identify every bird you can find, the answers are waiting for you with this free app from the renowned Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

WHY YOU’LL LOVE MERLIN
• Expert ID tips, range maps, photos, and sounds help you learn about the birds you spot and build birding skills.
• Discover a new bird species each day with your own personalized Bird of the Day
• Get customized lists of birds you can find where you live or travel - anywhere in the world!
• Keep track of your sightings—build your personal list of the birds you find

MACHINE LEARNING MAGIC
• Powered by Visipedia, Merlin Sound ID and Photo ID uses machine learning to identify birds in photos and sounds. Merlin learns to recognize bird species based on training sets of millions of photos and sounds collected by birders at eBird.org, archived in the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
• Merlin delivers the most accurate results thanks to experienced birders, who curate and annotate sightings, photos, and sounds, who are the true magic behind Merlin.

AMAZING CONTENT
• Choose bird packs that contain photos, songs, and calls, and identification help for anywhere in the world, including Mexico, Costa Rica, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, Australia, Korea, Japan, China, and more.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s mission is to interpret and conserve the Earth’s biological diversity through research, education, and citizen science focused on birds and nature. We are able to offer Merlin for free thanks to the generosity of Cornell Lab members, supporters, and citizen-science contributors.

Ratings and reviews

Pretty Good! My only issue with this app is that there are very few pictures included (if at all) of the underside of birds' wings. This seems like an oversight to me because plenty of what I see is as a human standing on the ground looking up at flying birds, and the lack of images showing birds' coloration or patterns on their undersides makes identifying them more difficult than it should be in my opinion. It's a really solid app otherwise and I'm glad to have downloaded it however long ago.

I think the most recent update broke it. The list of birds near me only shows some shore birds, the listening tool seems to have stopped working, and no matter what I plug into the step by step it shows no matches. I'm going to try restarting my phone or something, maybe? Edit Update: had to delete the app, re-download it, re-login, re-download my bird packs, and then it worked. -_- But, I am happy that it wasn't forever broken because it really is a fantastic app!

I just downloaded the app last week and the southeastern pack. After two days of using it and loving it, it suddenly stopped identifying birds thru the sound recordings and now doesn't adequately identify from photos. I get a no match for my area. When I attempt to "explore" the birds in my area, it pulls a list of 54 birds that are not in my area. I can still manually save them to my life list, but I'm not sure how to troubleshoot the app. Should I delete the app and reinstall?

What's new

Merlin has a new look!
The layout of Merlin has been updated to make the app more intuitive, faster to use, and easier to learn about the birds around you.
Introducing Your Bird of the Day
Get ready to discover a new bird every day with a personalized Bird of the Day picked just for you.
Explore Species While You Listen
Hear a new bird with Sound ID? Now you can read more about the species without stopping recording, so you don’t miss out on other IDs.