Birds are back. I don't mean in a migratory sense; I mean in popularity. Since 2020, birding has been on the rise and has proved to be more than a fad. Everyone I chat with these days seems to be captivated by corvids, wowed by wood ducks, and obsessed with owls.
There's no end to research and articles touting the mental and physical health benefits of simply being outdoors or going for a hike. But even beyond that, listening to birdsong—including when it's recorded—seems to have additional positive effects on wellness.
Part of the appeal of birding may be the very low barrier to entry—you don't need anything more than to go outside to observe birds. And if you want help identifying them, the Merlin Bird ID app by Cornell Lab is where you should start.
What Is the Merlin Bird ID App?
As its name suggests, Merlin Bird ID is a free app that helps you identify birds. You can do it the old-fashioned way by observing the bird's looks and actions and scouring a list to find one that matches. Or you can get more help with a few smart tools that identify birds by pictures you upload or even more conveniently, by their songs and calls as you record them. It's kind of like Shazam for birds.
The Sound ID takes the low barrier of entry to birding and makes it almost nonexistent. All you have to do is set up the app and then stand close enough to a bird to hear its tweets and whistles. You press a large microphone button and the app records the bird's sounds, showing you in a real-time waveform graph what it's picking up. When it identifies a species, an info card for that bird appears and is highlighted as the app continues to hear it. If the app catches more than one bird, you see each one light up as it sings.
Why Are We Obsessed With Merlin? For What It Hears
Here at PCMag, a group of us have been using the Merlin app for a few months or in some cases more than a year. We are all obsessed with it because it's made observing birds feel like a hobby that doesn't require deep knowledge and expertise to get into.
PCMag lead analyst Michael Muchmore describes himself as a decades-long birder. (Read some of his reviews of photo editing software and you'll come across quite a few of his bird pictures.) Even with all his experience, he says the Merlin app, "...has completely changed my birding. I get from 25% to 50% more species on a walk." It's all thanks to Sound ID. "Seeing which species is calling highlighted in yellow is a huge help and has made me a much better ear birder," he said.
For security analyst Kim Key, the app has sparked a brand-new interest. "I wasn't terribly interested in birds until I learned their species names. Now I'm fully devoted to feeding and protecting these creatures," she said. She added that the only feature of the app she uses is Sound ID.
Our colleague Neil J. Rubenking said the same thing: He only uses Sound ID. And Max Eddy, another analyst we all work with, has learned about birds he didn't know existed in his area, like fish crows.
The experienced birder among us, Michael Muchmore, explained that, "For inexperienced birders, [the Sound ID] is a huge boon since you never see all the species you hear. Going out on a guided bird walk for newbies could be underwhelming since you could go a long time without seeing anything interesting."
Birding Tech & Apps
Birdkiss Smart Bird Feeder With Solar Panel Review
3.5 Good $229.99 at Amazon See It (Opens in a new window)Merlin Bird ID
$0.00 at Apple App Store See It (Opens in a new window)eBird
$0.00 at Apple App Store See It (Opens in a new window)Even Professionals Use the Merlin App
That wasn't the case for me. My first guided bird walk was on a small farm at the foot of a volcano in Guatemala, a unique habitat that supports an incredible number of birds and bird species. My notes from that day list more than a dozen, including a stunning masked tityra, an eye-popping white-throated magpie-jay, and a few altamira orioles that you could mistake for tiny traffic cones in the trees.
Before that guided walk, I had used one of Cornell's bird websites to look up information, but I didn't know about the mobile app and everything it could do. My guide did, though. One of the reasons we saw so many species was because he used the app to pull up the info card of the northern pygmy owl. Then he turned on a Bluetooth speaker and played the pygmy owl's call. He said many of the birds in the area like to hunt this tiny owl, and so they swoop around and get a good vantage point on the trees to try and find it, making it easier for us humans to spot them.
Pursuing a Love of Birds
You couldn't ask for a better and easier introduction to birding than the Merlin app. It's free, it doesn't require any personal information, and in the United States, it's especially accurate at helping you identify species by photo or sound recording, or as you look up the characteristics and traits of a bird you observe.
An image captured by the Birdkiss Smart Bird FeederIf you want to make birding a more social activity, you can always look for groups in your local area. My mother, for example, recently enrolled in a birding class, ironically enough in the town of Ithaca where the Cornell campus is located. In addition to apps, guides, and in-personal classes, there are plenty of other bird-related gadgets to help, like the solar-powered Birdkiss Smart Bird Feeder With Solar Panel (shown above), which has a camera for shooting videos and photos of whoever stops in for a snack. This particular model can alert you when it spots motion, so you get a heads-up when birds are present. That's a great feature for people with accessibility issues that may prevent them from exploring the great outdoors easily, though you need a subscription plan to get it.
The Birdkiss feeder has a connected app where you can look up species, though it wasn't highly accurate in our testing. Our tester got better results when he grabbed the image of the bird and fed it into the Merlin app instead.
How to Organize Your Bird Sightings and Find More Species
While the Merlin app helps you identify bird species, it doesn't have any tools for keeping track of the birds you see. If you're ready to grow beyond what the Merlin app can do, you might download the eBird app, which is also made by Cornell Lab. It lets you keep a log of the birds you identify and organize your sightings.
The Merlin app and eBird app don't connect, which is too bad. It would be ideal to get help identifying birds and log them in the same app, but that's not currently possible.
The eBird app crowdsources data. All your bird sightings are sent to Cornell Lab, unless you use the app offline, which you can for some limited functions. The idea, though, is to submit bird sightings and share your location data so that other eBird users can find birding hotspots or places to see a particular species. (No personal information is shared, so the sightings aren't connected to you.) As you find locations to explore, the app tells you which species other people have logged in that spot and even the month when the sightings took place. So if you're itching to see a particular bird in a particular place, like the famous wood duck that hangs out in Central Park in Manhattan, you might have the best chance if you go at the same time of year when other people saw it there.
For more ways to use technology to connect with nature, see our list of the best apps for camping and glamping and take a tour inside the Airstream-inspired Lightship Electric RV.
