What's that bird? Ask Merlin—the world’s leading app for birds. Just like magic, Merlin Bird ID will help you solve the mystery.
Merlin Bird ID helps you identify birds you see and hear. Merlin is unlike any other bird app—it's powered by eBird, the world’s largest database of bird sightings, sounds, and photos.
Merlin offers four fun ways to identify birds. Answer a few simple questions, upload a photo, record a singing bird, or explore birds in a region.
Whether you’re curious about a bird you’ve seen once or you’re hoping to identify every bird you can find, the answers are waiting for you with this free app from the renowned Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
WHY YOU’LL LOVE MERLIN • Expert ID tips, range maps, photos, and sounds help you learn about the birds you spot and build birding skills. • Discover a new bird species each day with your own personalized Bird of the Day • Get customized lists of birds you can find where you live or travel - anywhere in the world! • Keep track of your sightings—build your personal list of the birds you find
MACHINE LEARNING MAGIC • Powered by Visipedia, Merlin Sound ID and Photo ID uses machine learning to identify birds in photos and sounds. Merlin learns to recognize bird species based on training sets of millions of photos and sounds collected by birders at eBird.org, archived in the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. • Merlin delivers the most accurate results thanks to experienced birders, who curate and annotate sightings, photos, and sounds, who are the true magic behind Merlin.
AMAZING CONTENT • Choose bird packs that contain photos, songs, and calls, and identification help for anywhere in the world, including Mexico, Costa Rica, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, Australia, Korea, Japan, China, and more.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s mission is to interpret and conserve the Earth’s biological diversity through research, education, and citizen science focused on birds and nature. We are able to offer Merlin for free thanks to the generosity of Cornell Lab members, supporters, and citizen-science contributors.
What’s that bird? Just answer 5 questions, snap a photo, or record its song!
Safety starts with understanding how developers collect and share your data. Data privacy and security practices may vary based on your use, region, and age. The developer provided this information and may update it over time.
I really really love this app, but for the past few weeks I've been getting kicked out of my account multiple times and it's so annoying. Worst part is, that I can't properly log in anymore, it brings me to my default browser for a few seconds and throws me back to the app, without sign in. It's really annoying, am I the only one having those problems? Please fix it, I wanna continue using this app, it's very dear to me :(
2 people found this review helpful
Tobias Marty (Dollique)
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July 15, 2026
Please fix your registration process. Using Firefox and a password manager lead to several problems. I could not click the submit button and was not given any error message. Also I had another problem where my generates password with 64 characters did always return the error that it is wrong. Only a 32 character password worked. For normies this is a non issue, but for me it is very annoying and took me a long time to figure out.
2 people found this review helpful
luis katterbach
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July 26, 2026
this an incredible app, it everything one could want from a bird spotting app. the photo id is extremely accurate, the sound id is insane, showing you live which bird is calling out when multiple birds are singing. and it has a dichotomy key style thing where you can input features and it goes through steps to gove you a list of possible birds
1 person found this review helpful
What’s new
What's new in 4.0: Enhanced account authentication - Added a more secure method for logging in Improved flow for saving birds - Streamlined the process for saving birds to your life list Bug fixes
Important Update Notice You'll be automatically logged out when this version launches due to the new authentication system. Simply log back in using any login screen. Forgot your password? Use the reset option to get back in quickly.