Watch the Birdy

I’ve been doing some research on birds and birdsong as I have some ideas for new work but I need to find out more.

A friend introduced me to the Merlin Bird ID App and has been developed by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Once downloaded you can use it to identify birds from a photograph or from a recording of the birdsong you can hear.

Merlin was created by bird experts for everyone. Merlin is global—look up any bird at any location. Keep track of your sightings—linked to eBird, a global database of more than 1 billion bird observations! Powered by Visipedia, Merlin Sound ID and Photo ID uses deep learning to identify birds in photos and sounds

It’s really accurate as I tested it against a friend of mine who is a life long bird spotter and can identify birds by their song and everything matched!

What I think is really clever is that it can identify many species of birds at the same time by the sound of their song. The recordings are available to listen to and it also tells you where the recording was made. Here’s a list of the birds that I heard on my walk in the woods this morning.

There are many other features to explore. For example you can download your data to their database which helps the Cornell lab to build a picture of which birds are living in which areas.

I am slightly obsessed by it.

Which is why I am telling everyone about it. Why not download it, see what you think and let me know