When Natasha Walter first became curious about the birds around her, she recorded their songs on her phone and arduously tried to match each song with online recordings. After a friend recommended Merlin Bird ID, a free app, she tried it in her London garden and was delighted to discover the birds she assumed were female blackbirds – “this is how bad a birder I was” – were actually song thrushes and mistle thrushes.
“I’m obsessed with Merlin – it’s wonderful and it’s been a joy to me,” says Walter, a writer and human rights activist. “This is what AI and machine-learning have been invented for. It’s the one good thing!”
Merlin is having a moment. The app, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York, which listens for birdsong and identifies the species singing, has been downloaded 33m times, in 240 countries and territories around the world. Britain has the second highest total number of users – more than 1.5 million in 2024, an 88% increase from 2023. Every month, there has been a 30% increase in new users of the app, whose sound identification function was launched in 2021.
Merlin has been trained to identify the songs of more than 1,300 species around the world, with more birds added twice a year. Different songs make distinct patterns on spectrograms and Merlin is trained to recognise these different shapes and attribute them to a species.
For latecomers to birding, or those lacking a knowledgeable friend, the app has become their teacher. “My fear at first was I wouldn’t actually learn because I’m outsourcing my understanding of birds to this app,” says Walter. “But that hasn’t come to pass. It’s helped me continue my journey of learning.” Nowadays, she guesses, and uses Merlin to confirm her hunches. “It’s wonderful if you’re coming to bird-watching late and don’t really have a mentor,” she says.
Angela Townsend from Bedfordshire began using Merlin after going on a nightingale walk one spring and being overwhelmed by the range of bird-voices in the evening chorus. She has found it has steadily built up her bird knowledge. “Warblers were just little brown jobbies but I can now recognise Cetti’s warblers and willow warblers when I’m out without having to put the app on,” she says.
Mary Novakovich, author of My Family and Other Enemies, is another recent adopter. She has found it particularly useful when travelling across Croatia, where her parents are from. “I love putting a name to a face and a name to the sound,” she says. “It really brings you closer to the natural world, rather than it being disconnected from your life. It’s part of what makes life a joy.”
Merlin is not flawless, however. The first time Kasper Wall, 12, tried it in his Norfolk garden, it detected a northern cardinal and a brown-headed cowbird – North American species not found in Britain.
“I think it was figuring out where we…
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