Merlin Bird ID by Cornell Lab

- July 17, 2017

Everyone

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( 2,826)

Merlin Bird ID by Cornell Lab- screenshot thumbnail

Description

What's that bird? Merlin Bird ID helps you solve the mystery in 5 questions, or with a photo of a bird.

First, Merlin asks you a few simple questions. Then, almost like magic, it reveals the list of birds that best match your description. Pick your bird, then delve into more photos, sounds, and ID tips about your bird!

If you have a photo, Merlin Photo ID is here to help. Take a photo, or choose one from your photo gallery, and Merlin will offer a list of birds that best match your photo.

Merlin is fun and easy to use—whether you’re curious about a bird you’ve seen once or you’re hoping to identify every bird that comes to your feeder. The answers are waiting for you with this free app from the renowned Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Features

• Merlin Photo ID can identify your bird photo. Select your photo, tell Merlin where and when you took it, and you'll see a short list of suggested identifications.
• Download bird packs containing the species of your region, reducing the app size.
• Created for beginning and intermediate bird watchers, Merlin identifies the 1,100 most common bird species of the continental United States, Canada, Mexico, Belize and Guatemala.
• Explore birds by location and date with a list of species seen in the area.
• Intelligent results. No more scanning through hundreds of possibilities! Merlin shows the birds near you that fit your description.
• Customized location and date tools generate best answers for your neighborhood and time of year.
• Powered by eBird to deliver the most accurate results based on millions of sightings from bird watchers across North America.
• Enjoy more than 7,000 photos of birds, including males, females, and juveniles.
• Learn ID tips from Cornell Lab of Ornithology experts.
• Listen to the beautiful bird songs and calls from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
• It’s all free! The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s goal is to help you and millions of others to learn about birds.

Merlin Bird ID currently includes Bird Pack downloads for the United States including: Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Rocky Mountains, Southwest, Texas and Oklahoma, Alaska, and West Coast. Canada is covered by Eastern Canada and Western Canada packs. Mexico packs include Yucatan Peninsula, and another for Oaxaca and Chiapas. Central America Bird Packs include Guatemala and Belize.

About Photo ID
Powered by Visipedia, Merlin Photo ID uses computer vision technology to identify birds in photos. Merlin learns to recognize bird species based on training sets of hundreds of thousands of photos from birders at eBird.org. When using photo ID, enter the date and location where you took the photo; those clues improve Merlin’s accuracy by helping it focus on the species you most likely encountered there.

Reviews

4.1

2,826 total

5 1,661

4 531

3 218

2 152

1 264

Jolyne Hebert

Love the app, multiple photos for variable coloring of birds, various bird songs and sounds... However I would love the app to show both French and English names once I've downloaded the additional language, I don't like that I need to re-download each language just to switch from one to the other, I hope this will be seen and would love to get the app updated! Thanks!

Kathy C

Worked well initially, but can no longer find my location. Have tried by city and zip code but have been getting the message "location service unavailable. Try again later" for a week now. Contacted customer support but have not gotten any reply.

Brittany Harding

I LOVE this app. I've been trying to learn birds is for years and this has been the best tool to help me think through ID features and learn to ID from memory. I recommend it to anyone trying to learn. Only suggestions/cons I've found are that the bird lists aren't complete, and it would be nice if were an option to save data (details entered in a search that was inconclusive so you have the info recorded to look up in a book later, or a list of birds IDd using the app)

Karl S.

It's a nice app, but you're better off with a good print field guide and bird song and call recordings. The simplistic bird ID feature is of little use, especially to experienced birders. There's not enough variety in the bird recordings or images to be really useful. Navigation through the bird list isn't very good. The photo ID, however, is very interesting. I haven't used it much, but it looks promising.

Kate Redfern

This app worked great the first few times I used it, but since a recent update, nothing comes up on searches and I cannot browse birds to look them up manually. Selecting a bird from the list merely takes me to the "packages containing" that bird. Not sure what happened, but it's become frustrating and useless.

This app is woderful except in southern Arizona we see a lot of Mexican species. In fact moe than 435 species are documented in Pima County alone.There simply are too few species in the entire USA bird package to cover all the birds we have in southern Arizona, so half the time the bird I am seeing is not identifiable using this app. I also find it wanting for photos of females and juveniles. Other than that I love the app & consider it extremely helpful.

User reviews

Jolyne Hebert July 17, 2017

Kathy C July 12, 2017

Brittany Harding June 28, 2017

Karl S. July 10, 2017

Kate Redfern June 24, 2017

July 5, 2017

July 7, 2017

This app never shows any results anymore. I don't know why. It used to work great, but now there are no results. I'm uninstalling.

Phil Schumacher June 17, 2017

Can't find common birds in my location or I'm not giving good information but I've checked my info several times.

Rachael Mann June 20, 2017

I've tried searching several birds over the last few days that are very common to the area I am in and nothing is coming up. 😟

July 17, 2017

Was a great app but now when I try to identify a photo it says image classification failed still having problem after several updates. Please fix

Ruben Yanez June 27, 2017

Location services won't work, not even when I name a city.

June 28, 2017

This app is great. What I would like to see is the addition of an ID quiz to assist in learning to know the species. Show a photo and have the user select the species.

lale yildirim June 20, 2017

Only has birds from Americas and Canada, nothing from England or Europe or rest of world

Madelyn Mette June 29, 2017

I love that you can quickly and easily listen to the bird songs!

Lizzie Sheehan July 13, 2017

So helpful in identifying birds! Whether you are a new or experienced bird watcher, this app is a must have.

Jeff Smith July 4, 2017

Amazing! Works extremely well. Thank you for this great free app!

Jay Bee July 13, 2017

If you love birds this is the app for you..

OctuvusRaptor10 July 1, 2017

Stupid

July 15, 2017

Love this app

Robert Katuna June 17, 2017

Uninstalling because of it being a storage hog. Love the app itself though. Update 6/17/17 - tried new version, still can't move 1/2 GB that appears after downloading 1gb bird pack to external storage despite setting storage to external. Need to uninstall again until that half gb gets trimmed down

Cornell Lab of Ornithology August 18, 2016

Thanks for the feedback. You'll be happy to know that the latest version (1.1) is a very small download and lets you select just the birds of your region, significantly reducing the size of the app. It can also be stored on the SD card now. Download the update and let us know what you think!

John nunya June 18, 2017

Good app but a lack of accuracy takes away functionality. For example i have a cat bird in my oriole feeder almost daily but cant report the siting because the app says they arent in my area

Vignesh Sethuraman June 6, 2017

Clunky. Frustrating. Disorienting. Keeps loading for nearby packages. Edit: reinstalled app and added package. Works well. Thanks for providing a great resource top the community.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology June 6, 2017

It sounds like the content installation of Merlin did not complete properly. Please try the following: * Tap the menu button in Merlin, then Bird Packs. * Tap on the installed Bird Pack. * Delete that Bird Pack. * Once it is deleted, select a Bird Pack and install it again. * Check to see the images, maps and sounds are working now

Brian Tustison June 4, 2017

It worked well when I downloaded it, but the last few weeks it has been useless. Just for an experiment I searched for black, crow sized, in a tree... no matches.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology June 6, 2017

Kaitlin Bernert June 8, 2017

I LOVE using the app to identify birds in my yard. I wish it had a feature that saved birds that I've previously identified so I could go back to look at them.

kelsey dennison June 19, 2017

Love the search function! Wish I could save a list of the birds I have identified?

Samantha Degges June 11, 2017

To use app, you must download files between 90 MB - 250 MB! This should be a web app to even be functional.

Matthew Bone June 1, 2017

It works again! Woohoo.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology June 2, 2017

Thanks for giving Merlin another shot! Happy birding.

Frank Engel June 7, 2017

Excellent work, and another great example of positive benefits of NSF education related projects!

Jonathan Rose June 1, 2017

Very straightforward and easy to use

david pollard June 13, 2017

Excellent bird id app from trusted source

Patricia Winkler June 6, 2017

Correctly identified birds with a minimum of information.

June 18, 2017

This app is great for identifying birds. I only use the photo id feature.

Paul Barchilon June 7, 2017

Awesome for identifying new birds!

Tatiana Gaitan July 4, 2017

This app work great :)

Farrah Doss June 12, 2017

In love!!!!!!!💗

Joseph Neal May 21, 2017

Update: app stated working and it's great! I have be able to identify so many birds. The only reason it gets 4 stars is you can't create a list of birds you have identified. But the photo tool works like a dream. Has not been able to one bird. Even what should be an easy bird to identify, a mallard duck. Will keep trying because I like the idea. Will update if the apps start working better and give a better rating. I hope it works

Darrell Shuman May 23, 2017

Worthless. The birds I am looking at do not appear in results. There were quail in my yard so a search for quail did not return the most common quail there is. Thanks to a Google search for quail I then searched in the app for "Northern Bobwhite" and there it was saying "the only quail native to Eastern North America" and the map shows it is more widespread than any of the examples returned in the quail search. Even then at first there were no results because I had to remove the space at the end of Bobwhite that spellchecker adds. Maybe a good app for ornitholigists who already know everything but useless for novice hobbiest. The quail example is only the latest frustration. Every time I try to use this app I have a similar experience. It rarely returns the bird I am looking at. The Audubon app is no better.

jaybe williams May 30, 2017

So, without the help of this app, I identified a mississippi kite in western ky. But I thought maybe it's just because it's fairly rare here. But then I described a bluebird which are plentiful here, and merlin didn't recognize that either. App is worthless.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology June 1, 2017

Andie Ernst May 16, 2017

(If you've been having trouble with the app not giving any results, read below!) This app is amazing!! It's been spot on every time and even gave additional birds in the results that were pretty close to what I searched, just in case I didn't get the best look at the bird and my search input was slightly off! I would love if there was a way to save the birds I've seen to a list of my own, even if it required me to create an account to log in, so I could always refer back to my list. (Which, I just found out, it looks like they're preparing to release a version with this feature in the next few months!) Also, when I first started searching for my bird, no results were popping up and I was quite disappointed with the app and almost uninstalled it... until I realized that I had to install a 'Bird Pack' before any results would actually show up. (Which I believe is what a couple of the 1-star ratings are referring to when they said no results were showing.) Maybe guiding the user to the 'Bird Packs' section before they really delve into the app would be a good idea, that way people don't get frustrated and uninstall the app before they realize how amazing it is. I Love it and can't wait to head out to some parks to discover even more birds! ♡

Corbin Ashley June 3, 2017

**Update: I was contacted by the support team a month after and they said the bird packs were likely not loading and asked me to remove it and reload, it worked and I'm back up and running again so I changed my rating from 1 star to 4 stars, only 4 stars because this IS a great app but it really should keep a log of what you ID, when you ID it and where you ID them and you should be able to review this list at anytime, this is the only draw back I can see.** App worked very well in the past, I hadn't used it in awhile and now every time I try to ID a bird it tells me there isn't a likely bird for my description, no matter what info I give. I even described a crow and it still came up with nothing! I'm super disappointed that it doesn't work anymore...

Cornell Lab of Ornithology June 8, 2017

Thanks Corbin! We agree that Merlin should keep a list of your past identifications, and we are working on this feature. Keep the feedback coming!

What's New

Did you know we've added nearly a thousand new species in Merlin over the past year? Many of those are available as updates to packs you have already downloaded, but if you don't check the Bird Pack screen, you'll never see them! Merlin will now alert you when a new update is available.

When you are browsing your photos, you can now quickly open one for Merlin to identify by tapping the share icon and selecting Merlin Photo ID.