Merlin Bird ID by Cornell Lab of Ornithology is a brilliant app to help you identify birds while walking outdoors in Belgium – or elsewhere.
Designed for beginner and intermediate birdwatchers, Merlin Bird ID is a smartphone app available for Android and iOS. I’ve been using it for over a year and I think it’s absolutely brilliant – particularly it’s ability to identify bird calls and songs. So let’s have a look at its main features.
Free – and no ads
This is a good starting point! The app is free to install, and does not contain those annoying pop-up ads you usually get in free apps.
Globally available
The app can be used anywhere in the world. Currently it has content for over 6,000 birds. Obviously you won’t need all that info, so the makers offer Bird Packs, each of them tailored to the birds that may visit your region.
Easy to start
Upon opening the app for the first time, you are prompted to download your relevant country or region’s Bird Pack (list of birds). There looks to be over one hundred packs, ranging from specific countries like Iceland, Uruguay or Kenya to regions like US Northeast, North Africa or South East Asia. I selected Europe: Western, which says it includes “frequently encountered species found in France, north to Germany and east to Austria” so that includes Belgium. It lists 381 birds in this region.
The opening menu displays three options: Step by Step, Sound ID, and Photo ID.
The best: Sound ID
I’m going to start with what I consider the best feature of Merlin, which is Sound ID. This is the feature of Merlin that I use the most and is superb. Sound ID listens to the birds around you and shows real-time suggestions for what’s singing or calling.
When you are outdoors and you hear a bird, you simply open Merlin, press Sound ID and then the big microphone icon. The app then “listens” to the bird and tells you what it is. Yes it really is that simple – and it works marvellously. Here are two examples when it identified a number of different species in short recordings:
Highly accurate
After over a year of using Merlin in the field, I estimate that it matches a call/song of a bird with the correct bird 99% of the time. I can say this because I am pretty well acquainted with the calls and songs of most common birds that I am likely to hear in my neighborhood, having learned them as a young boy from LPs (e.g. Bird Sounds in Close-up). Very occasionally Merlin gives me a questionable identification so it’s not % perfect, but I reckon it only makes a mistake once per 100 recordings.
Visual identification
To get Merlin to identify a bird you have seen, press “Step by Step” and the app asks where you saw the bird, when you saw it, the size of the bird, its main colors, and what the bird was doing. It then creates a list of possible birds. You can scroll through the possibilities until you recognize the bird you have seen. If you can’t find your bird you can adjust your answers – adding another color for example, or more accurately defining its size. Here are two examples of results for different searches:
ID from a photo
You can also press Photo ID. This is when you can take a photo or choose a photo from your library, and the app identifies it.
Drawbacks
It’s not really a drawback of this app, more a personal opinion of using any app while I am outdoors enjoying nature. Basically, I don’t want to be on my phone a lot when walking in nature. For this reason I do not use the “Step by Step” mode as I don’t want to be spending time scrolling through the questions. If I see a mystery bird I prefer to take notes – or if I have my camera and telephoto lens with me, take a picture – and then look it up either in Merlin or in a bird book back home.
But that’s just my personal way of working. I do however use the Sound ID mode a lot.
More useful bird info
The app also provides a lot of useful information on birds. If you enter the “Explore Birds” mode you can scroll through all the birds in your Bird Pack, pick out the bird you wish to know more about, and find out lots of details such as photographs, sounds, maps, and ways to identify it in the future. The photos include males, females, as well as juvenile photos of each species. It really is very comprehensive.
Where do I use it?
Personally, for me its great strength lies in its ability to identify bird sounds in real-time. This is how I use the app as it’s fun and it really improves my ability to identify birds. Birds have such a range of calls. One type of call, and one which I am not so familiar with, is the flight call. Birds in a flock keep in contact with each other by chirping to each other. Flight calls of finches and buntings, for example, are quite similar, and I am not very good at identifying them. Merlin, however, has no such problem. So I was delighted when it identified a flock of small birds passing quickly overhead as containing chaffinches, linnets and reed buntings!
Another example is a mixed winter flock of tits working through the tops of trees in a forest. These often contain various species. Again, Merlin comes up trumps. It identified a recent small flock of about 30 tits as containing at least one blue tit, great tit, coal tit and a marsh tit.
I am also impressed by Merlin’s “ears”, which pick up bird sounds from quite a distance away. I was in my local woodland the other day, listening to the birds, and using Merlin, a Jay came up on the screen. I know what a Jay sounds like and I had not heard a Jay. But then way in the distance I heard … a Jay! It must have been half a kilometer away or more. Merlin had picked it up before I had.
Overall conclusion
I think that the developers over at Cornell University have done a fantastic job compiling such a great app and making it available for free. I highly recommend it. And as I mentioned earlier, you can use it anywhere in the world. More information on the Cornell site.
If you download and use it, let me know how you get on with it by adding a comment or sending an email.
I created Discovering Belgium in 2011 to share the country’s hidden stories, fascinating places, and remarkable people. Through articles, photography, and audio walks, I share discoveries that reveal Belgium beyond the obvious. Hope you enjoy this site.
blackbird do have the most melodious song.
Sounds like a great app for birdwatchers.
I’ve been using this Merlin app for a year or so and can heartily endorse it, it picks up fairly faint birdsongs on my walks and it’s fun to learn who is out there singing in the woods, even if you can’t always spot them.
Hi Robert, that’s good to hear. I can imagine you being an enthusiastic user in your local woods.
Yes, it’s a good app, but no, it is not perfect – even 99% of the time. It has come up with a few spectacular bloopers – things that made us laugh at the time, but would be worrying if someone was relying on it for ID. I see it as a good starting point. If it IDs a bird sound you aren’t familiar with, you really need to see the bird to make sure. I haven’t seen the step-by-step bit yet, though I would try it if I was in an area where I was unfamiliar with the local birds.
This afternoon we heard a bird call that sound more like a willow-warbler than a chiffchaff, but willow-warblers aren’t here yet. Bob said ‘what does merlin think it is?’. So I got the phone out, and merlin said it was a great tit. Actually, by then we were closer to the sound and had already decided it was probably a great tit.
However, we had a list of 30 species for the day, and merlin had only 8. Occasionally it will hear something that I don’t, but more often we will hear a lot more that it does.
Another thing to remember when using it, is that some birds are very good mimics, starlings, skylarks and song thrushes, for example. Merlin came up with quite a string of impossible IDs for a single starling in song last week.
By all means make use of it, but use it with caution.
But give me a notebook and pencil (and camera) any day. I fully agree with your first paragraph under ‘drawbacks’!
That’s a good point about mimics Annie, I didn’t think of that. Yes I could imagine a Starling would totally confuse Merlin. I once heard a starling do a great imitation of a curlew. The only serious mistake I have found with Merlin is it’s fondness of identifying a Spotted Flycatcher in my local woods. Either it’s a mistake or I (and other local birdwatchers) are missing a rarity. So far I’ve not been able to spot the bird making that call. Thanks for your feedback.