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'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 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 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 had friends in MIT's computational linguistics group back in the 1980s who did a casual get together where they'd take turns handing out spectrograms of human speech and for the rest of the group to try and interpret. Apparently this started with some noted researcher asserting that you couldn't interpret a spectrogram faster than it was originally spoken, and one of them decided to learn them well enough to disprove it by example, which turned out to be easy but inspired them to continue by trying to make more challenging ones - culminating in getting John Moschitta Jr. to record for them :-)
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.
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!
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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!
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)!
(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)
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
Consistently assigning names to different blackbirds might be tricky, but, for other birds, I am sure that some AI algorithm could do this.
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
Please Let your friends know that roosters are birds too and deserve their recognition as the world's wake up call! Lol
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
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!
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!
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.
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.
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".
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.
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?
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’m afraid that I scared them away from an active nest by accident just playing around with the app. :(
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.
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!
> 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.
It really has opened up a whole new venue of enjoying this hobby. At least here, machine learning/AI has a clear, positive impact.
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.
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
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.
The two are visually distinctive but, in Merlin's defence, I can't tell them apart by ear either!