What Kind of Bird Is That?: A Free App From Cornell Will Give You the Answer

Part of the mis­sion of the Cor­nell Lab of Ornithol­o­gy is to help peo­ple answer the ques­tion, “What is that bird?” And so, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Visi­pedia research project, they’ve designed Mer­lin, a free app avail­able on iTunes and Google Play.

The app asks you a few basic ques­tions — what’s the col­or, size, and behav­ior of the bird you saw, and also when and where did you see it — and then, draw­ing on a data­base of infor­ma­tion gath­ered by Cor­nell experts and thou­sands of bird enthu­si­asts, the app will give you a short­list of pos­si­bil­i­ties. From there you can zero in on the actu­al bird you saw.

The free app (intro­duced in the video above) launched with “285 species most com­mon­ly encoun­tered in North Amer­i­ca.” But Cor­nell plans to add more species and fea­tures over time. Mean­while, the cur­rent app already offers “more than 2,000 stun­ning images tak­en by top pho­tog­ra­phers,” “more than 1,000 audio record­ings from the Macaulay Library, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tips from experts, and range maps from the Birds of North Amer­i­ca Online.”

Hap­py bird­watch­ing!

via Cor­nell/Petapix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

A Bird Bal­let in South­ern France

A Stun­ning, Chance Encounter With Nature