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

Perfect for casual birdwatchers and bird enthusiasts. I don't know what it took me so long to download this app—I've had Cornell's ornithology website bookmarked for a long time—but I don't regret it one bit. It was great for identifying birds on vacation and for adding birds in my local area to my life list. I find myself stopping on my morning walks to work to record and ID the birds I hear, I can't recommend this enough. Takes up a lot of data for packs, but it's a reasonable trade off.

Good for sound identification, bad for tracking your life list. Listening to birds while walking through the woods and actually getting a sense for what kind of birds they might be is super fun! This app often refuses to let me track birds that it deems too rare for a given location or time frame. I want an app that will let me track my casual birding life list, with nice pictures, and not make me use researcher level rigor or attempt 100% accuracy. Date and location would be nice if optional.

Disclosure: I'm a member of the Cornell Orthology program, and participate in many of their programs (e g., Feeder Watch). This app is astounding due to the richness of data that supports it (audio recordings in the Cornell database). I find this highly accurate. There are times, with loud background noises (lawnmowers, etc) that you will get an erroneous suggestion... But that is fully understandable. I highly recommend this app.

What’s new

Get ready for bird migration with better ID tools and flexible downloads!

Sound ID update: Merlin is now more responsive, so you'll see more IDs as Merlin listens to the birds around you.

Photo ID update: Trained in bird ID with over 6 million practice photos, Merlin can identify your photos better now than ever before.

Smaller and more flexible downloads: Download bird info as you go, or download information for a whole region at once for offline use!

Happy birding!