Bird ID Tools

[Lester Wareham]

I just came across Cornell Lab Merlin app, this does sound and picture IDs on a smart phone. It's free but you do need to register.

I using it on an iPhone, quite impressed. Very good for learning bird calls.

 

[pcs]

Obsidentify https://observation.org/apps/obsidentify/ is also very good(for the birds I see here even better) for picture ID. I use Birdnet https://birdnet.cornell.edu/ for sound ID(probably the same as the one in the Merlin app). Both available for Android and iOS
Obsidentify also works on other animals and even plants(although less acurate).

 

[Lester Wareham]

Oh yes I do have obsidentify also.

These tools are quite powerful.

 

[Levina de Ruijter]

Obsidentify

Been using that since you mentioned it, Patrick. Does a pretty good job.

 

[West Coast Birder]

I just came across Cornell Lab Merlin app, this does sound and picture IDs on a smart phone. It's free but you do need to register.

I using it on an iPhone, quite impressed. Very good for learning bird calls.

I use it all the time and my son who is a big birder and is studying biology at university says it is an indispensable tool. Of course it can get confused sometimes, so if it says identifies some ultra rare species, maybe take it with a grain of salt, but for most common stuff it is amazingly accurate

 

[KD_Reno]

I use Merlin to identify calls, especially in spring when I have to relearn most of them. Also, my phone picks up sounds that I can't hear. It's fairly accurate and getting more complete, but I wouldn't rely on it to id an unfamiliar bird.

I started birding way before the internet and phone apps, so I don't use them much. I can usually narrow a sighting down to a couple of birds. I have the Sibley guide app on my phone, and it's handy for checking field marks or comparing two species. And the All About Birds website (also Cornell) provides nice comparisons of similar birds and has links to the Macaulay Library which has photos of nearly every bird in the world (a few to hundreds of thousands depending on species).

I did play around with Merlin using photos on my computer screen. I even tried it on some first-year gulls. It always gave me the usual suspects, but the first species listed confirmed my id.

 

[Nordlys]

I often try my luck on this site (it has a French and an English version):

Les oiseaux

www.oiseaux.net

 

[Nature's Spectrum]

I believe I am outdated. I've been using discoverlife.org for years. I need to try one of these phone apps. I have them for plants and insects, and they work pretty well.

 

[Lester Wareham]

To be fair I mostly use printed field guides but supplemented with on-line resources.

Recognition of bird call is I think a great learning aid.

I am also aware of a hardware addon and app that recognises bat calls; not free of course.

 

[icee]

Just downloaded Obsidentify, seems to work well.

 

[mike.cambridge]

is anyone aware of a plugin for Lightroom that uses the brains of Merlin or Obsidentify to auto-tag bird photos? that would be amazing and I'd probably pay for it... (I'm not even **close** to smart enough to build it myself!)

 

[Lester Wareham]

is anyone aware of a plugin for Lightroom that uses the brains of Merlin or Obsidentify to auto-tag bird photos? that would be amazing and I'd probably pay for it... (I'm not even **close** to smart enough to build it myself!)

No it's a good idea though.

I have not tried the image ID as generally I recognise most birds.

I guess a work around is to render to jpeg and get it to look at that via the normal interface.

 

[Levina de Ruijter]

is anyone aware of a plugin for Lightroom that uses the brains of Merlin or Obsidentify to auto-tag bird photos? that would be amazing and I'd probably pay for it... (I'm not even **close** to smart enough to build it myself!)

I use Obsidentify. It would be awesome to have it in Lightroom! On the other hand it’s only on occasion we can’t identify a bird so I doubt anyone will bother building a plugin for it.

 

[Nature's Spectrum]

It would be a neat plugin, although potentially a difficult one to code. Adobe doesn't provide a very clean way of working with keywords/tags via the API. You can get to them but working with them is clunky.