Merlin Bird ID by Cornell Lab 4+
Field Guide with Instant ID
Cornell University
Designed for iPhone
-
- Free
iPhone Screenshots
Description
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.
What’s New
Version 3.1
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.
Accessibility Improvements
Merlin’s new layout is more compatible with accessibility features, including more dynamic text sizes.
We periodically release fixes and updates to improve Merlin Bird ID and help you identify more birds. Your feedback and support drive our ongoing efforts to create a better birding experience for everyone. Stay tuned for more updates, improvements, and exciting features!
Ratings and Reviews
Must-have tool and valuable resource for birders
Thank you for this super valuable tool and resource for birding, one that I use all the time in the field, and while reviewing photos from the field.
The 'Explore Birds' section with the ability to look up birds by location, the succinct information of the birds with images, the geographical maps with breeding, non-breeding, migration and year-round presence of the birds, as well as the bird calls is the section I use all the time. The bird calls are particularly useful when you can hear the bird but don't see it.
The 'Photo ID' is also very helpful in narrowing the options, while the Sound ID is also useful, though I tend to use BirdNET most of the time for this. The Start Bird ID is the section I use the least, though also very useful to have.
I would also highly recommend the Birds of the World website of The CornellLab of Ornithology that offers richer details of the birds, habitats, behavior etc.
I must confess that the app and the Birds of the World website are so handy and helpful that I hardly refer to, or turn to, the many bird field guide books I have collected over the years, which are nevertheless very good to have :-)
Review for M1 mac
This is already a great app for the mobile devices, but there is room for improvement for the desktop app - when using the photo id, it's not possible to select images from the Photos (previously iPhoto) app. It's insensitive to mouse clicks/taps. If someone uses tab button (⇥), then also it selects some random photo in place of the intended (or selected) photo.
Hoping the team looks into it & make it fully utilizable on mac! Cheers,
Great ap
Thanks for such a great ap. A must have app for all birders all around the world. The photo recognition is the one i have used and they are spot on most of the occasion even on a noisy or blurry pic. The app brings out the right bird most of the time. Have been using this app for the last 2 years and will be an app that will remain in my phone as long as it lives 😃 A wholehearted five star from a long term user of the same 😇😇
Events
App Privacy
The developer, Cornell University, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.
Data Linked to You
The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:
- Identifiers
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
- Location
- Contact Info
- Usage Data
Privacy practices may vary based on, for example, the features you use or your age. Learn More
Information
- Provider
- Cornell University
- Size
- 114.5 MB
- Category
- Reference
- Compatibility
-
- iPhone
- Requires iOS 16.0 or later.
- Mac
- Requires macOS 13.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.
- Apple Vision
- Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- Languages
-
English, Afrikaans, Arabic, Danish, French, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Marathi, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Zulu
- Age Rating
- 4+
- Copyright
- © Cornell University
- Price
- Free