Recently, I had a day of backyard birding in Jacksonville. I love the bird wildlife in my area, but I’m not very knowledgeable in identifying birds. In the past, I would heavily rely on books or guides.

However, I’ve noticed that my iPhone’s Photo Gallery, with the latest iOS update, has an animal identification built-in feature that is pretty good. It will show you an internet search, which sometime may be wrong, but it is more often is right.

In addition, I’ve been a long-time user of the Audubon (National Audubon Society) app, which has bird offline content (this is useful when you don’t have internet access). Unfortunately, this app requires you to manually look up a bird. For example, it asks for the bird’s size, its color, its tail shape, etc. If you know the bird terminology, this is not a deterrent.

I found that the easiest way to find the bird, using the Audubon app, is just to look up its color. For example, my black, white, red bird shows Red-Bellied Woodpecker. iOS tells me it’s a West Indian Woodpecker… while these two birds are identical or from the same bird species, however, the West Indian Woodpecker is not native to Florida.

The other app, that is new to me, and came highly recommended by their fans, is called Merlin Bird ID, by Cornell Lab. This app offers the old-style look-up similar to Audubon, but if you have a photo, it will use machine learning to match your bird to its database… and it’s very effective! It does a much better job in finding my bird than the iOS built-in lookup.

Merlin also offers Sound ID, which will match your bird with a recording of its sound. I did not use this feature, but I am assuming it will be just as impressive as their photo lookup feature.

Both apps are free, and unless you’re tight on storage space, I recommend installing the full North American bird pack (1.31GB). I did this because, although I’m currently in Florida, I will be spending some time in Minnesota… so I might as well install the entire USA map.

Finally, if you want to keep track of all the birds you’ve seen, you can sign up for an account and mark down the date and location of the bird sighting. You don’t have to sign in, but that is a nice option if you want to keep a personal record.

Overall, I’m quite impressed with the Merlin Bird ID. I can’t believe this app is free.