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, Merlin identifies the 2,000+ most common bird species of the continental United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America and Europe.
• Merlin will now identify a photo using powerful deep learning algorithms. Select your photo, tell Merlin where and when you took it, and you’ll see a short list of suggested identifications.
• Bird packs available for United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Guatemala, Belize and Costa Rica, with more coming soon.
• Explore birds by location and date with a list of species seen in the area.
• Intelligent results. No more scanning through hundreds of possibilities! Merlin shows the birds near you that fit your description.
• Customized location and date tools generate best answers for your neighborhood and time of year.
• Powered by eBird to deliver the most accurate results based on millions of sightings from bird watchers across North America.
• Enjoy more than 15,000 photos of birds, including males, females, and juveniles.
• Learn ID tips from Cornell Lab of Ornithology experts.
• Listen to beautiful bird sounds, including songs and calls for each species from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
• It’s all 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.

Bird Packs

Merlin Bird ID currently includes bird identification help for the United States with regional packs for the: Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Rocky Mountains, Southwest, Texas and Oklahoma, Alaska, and West Coast.

Canada is covered by Eastern Canada and Western Canada packs.

Mexico bird identification is available for each region of the country.

Central America packs include Guatemala, Belize, and Costa Rica.

South America packs include the Medellín region of Colombia.

Bird identification help is also available for Europe with our Great Britain and Ireland pack, a Western Europe pack, and a pack covering the Scandinavian countries.

These packs make Merlin the perfect pocket Bird Guide to North America, Bird Guide to Mexico, Bird Guide to Guatemala, Bird Guide to Belize, Bird Guide to Costa Rica, Bird Guide to Europe, Bird Guide to Great Britain, and Bird Guide to Scandinavia.

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.