A blue-winged warbler with its corresponding sound ID on the app. (Luke Seitz) Campus & Beyond What’s that Bird? Like Magic, ‘Merlin’ Can Tell You Stories You May Like Recent Grad Saddles Up as 2024’s Miss Rodeo America Eek! How Much Do You Know About Creepy-Crawly Big Red History? Thought Prelims Were Hard? Try These Vintage Entrance Exams Highly rated by users, the Lab of Ornithology’s free identification app has millions of devotees worldwide By Melissa Newcomb You hear birds chirping, singing, and trilling in the trees—but what feathered friends are making those calls? Perhaps you catch a glimpse of brightly colored plumage; what species might it be? Never fear: the Lab of Ornithology has an app for that. Called Merlin, the free app—which has been continually updated and expanded over the years—can identify thousands of species on all seven continents. It has proved wildly popular, with 23 million total downloads since it debuted in 2014; it was used by more than 12 million people in 2024 alone. Rachel PhilipsonThe app in use in the field. Available for both Android and iPhone (and boasting a rating of 4.9 out of 5 in the Apple App Store), Merlin offers a variety of ways to make an identification in real time—even without an Internet connection. Leveraging the Lab’s vast library of recordings that trains the machine learning models that power Merlin, birds—especially those in regions like the U.S., Canada, and Europe—can be identified through snippets of their calls and songs. Merlin has proved wildly popular, with 23 million total downloads since it debuted in 2014. The feature, called Sound ID, is Merlin’s newest and most popular tool—and it has already been used to make more than 1.3 billion identifications. It was developed in 2021 using resources from eBird, the Lab’s open-access database, where birders can submit audio and photos. The database also informed the app’s visual ID capabilities: Merlin compares a photo to its trove of 67 million images, submitted by birders around the world. Lab of OrnithologyMerlin allows users to ID a species using their phone's camera. Stories You May Like Recent Grad Saddles Up as 2024’s Miss Rodeo America Eek! How Much Do You Know About Creepy-Crawly Big Red History? (To ensure accuracy, all submitted media undergoes a vetting process.) And the app can even identify birds without using sounds or images. The “Bird ID Wizard” suggests possible species based on the answers to five questions: where and when the bird was spotted; its size and coloration; and what it was doing. “We want to bring the joy of birds to everybody,” says Alli Smith, Merlin’s project coordinator, “not only because birds are charming, but because once you start to care about birds, you start to care about other things, like climate change or habitat loss in your community.” Merlin is offered in 23 languages, including Spanish, French, Chinese, Italian, Arabic, Afrikaans, and Zulu. It also boasts other features, like keeping life lists and letting users note the birds they’re likely to spot based on location. We want to bring the joy of birds to everybody. Alli Smith, project coordinator And to continue growing the database of species Merlin can identify, the Lab partners with conservation groups around the world to train people how to collect the data—with active projects in Australia, Taiwan, New Zealand, Colombia, and elsewhere. Ultimately, says Smith, “we want to have every bird that makes sound available for our users to identify in Sound ID." To continue growing the database of species Merlin can identify, the Lab partners with conservation groups around the world to train people how to collect the data. Among Smith’s favorite anecdotes about Merlin users: a woman who confided that while her husband is a longtime birder, she’d never shared his passion—until she downloaded the app. “Now, when she does her makeup in the morning, she leaves the window open with Merlin recording,” Smith says, “and afterward, she and her husband look at the birds together.” Top: A blue-winged warbler with its corresponding sound ID on the app. (All bird photos in this story by Luke Seitz.) Published December 13, 2024 Leave a Comment Cancel replyOnce your comment is approved, your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *Comment * Name * Class Year Email * Save my name, email, and class year in this browser for the next time I comment. Δ Other stories You may like Bear Hugs What Makes a Beautiful Campus Even Prettier? Hydrangeas! Campus & Beyond ILR’s Worker Institute Helps Guide a Newly Energized Labor Movement Quizzes & Puzzles Two Truths and a Lie: Alumni Gridiron Edition