Cornell Lab: Merlin Bird ID

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 can help there as well. Take a photo, choose from your camera roll, or snap the viewfinder of your zoom camera, and Merlin’s powerful AI will suggest an identification almost instantly.

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 field guide app from the renowned Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Features

• Created for birders and bird watchers of every level.

• Intelligent results. No more scanning through hundreds of possibilities! Merlin shows the birds near you that fit your description.

• Merlin can identify a bird in a photo using powerful deep learning algorithms. Snap a photo and you’ll see a short list of suggested birds to explore.

• Customized location and date tools generate best answers for your neighborhood and time of year.

• Bird packs with photos, songs and calls, and identification help available for regions around the world, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, South America, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia.

• Enjoy more than 40,000 photos of birds, including males, females, and juveniles.

• Learn ID tips from Cornell Lab of Ornithology experts.

• Listen to beautiful bird sounds, including 18,000 songs and calls for each species curated by the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

• Powered by eBird to deliver the most accurate results based on millions of sightings from bird watchers across the world.

• Identification tips are available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, German, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese, depending on the range of the species.

Best of all, it’s free! The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s goal is to help you and millions of others to learn about birds.​

Merlin is the most advanced bird guide app available, and is expanding to new regions of the world.

••• About Photo ID •••

Powered by Visipedia, Merlin Photo ID uses computer vision and deep learning technology to identify birds in photos. Merlin learns to recognize bird species based on training sets of millions 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.


Science Topics
Zoology
Animals
Birds
K-6, Middle School, High School, College
Kindergarten, 1st Grade, 2nd Grade, 3rd Grade, 4th Grade, 5th Grade, 6th Grade, 7th Grade, 8th Grade, 9th Grade, 10th Grade, 11th Grade, 12th Grade

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