Before I go any further, I have to stress that I am not a bird expert and I am not even a super serious bird watcher / birder. But I have built an immense admiration for birds and whenever I go out and especially when I travel, I am on the lookout for them. I have always been fascinated by the outdoors, but my interest in birds actually started when I kept hearing a strange call at a playground in front of our house and kept wondering what that was. It turned out it was a fieldfare, but I only knew after I downloaded the Merlin Bird ID app and managed to capture the call. Here it was, clearly matching the already captured calls, with a description and plenty of additional information. Bingo!

The magic of the Merlin Bird ID app is being able to identify a bird in multiple ways: either going through a decision tree about your location, the bird’s appearance and behaviour, or through recording its calls, or from a photo. I’d argue these are some of the most brilliant ways artificial intelligence has been used. As Ian Campbell put it in his Inverse article about the app, it’s “an AI that helps push you away from your phone and appreciate the world around you,” which stands in stark contrast to algorithmic feeds and the personalized hell of social media that try to suck you into your phone’s screen.

Most importantly, the Merlin app set me on a path to grow my interest in birds, because it made identifying birds easy and frictionless; it gave me a great head start and the motivation to continue. Soon, I didn’t even need to pull out my phone to identify the more common birds in my area just by their call. It may not be the most useful skill in the world, but I was so proud of myself, and felt happiness and warmth for reconnecting with the natural world, something we seem to do less and less.

The app also encourages you to collect “lifers” (birds you were able to identify), very much like you’d collect Pokemon. Gotta catch them all! And I do try to catch them all, whether it’s blue jays and great-tailed grackles in Texas, kestrels in the UK or common magpies in Spain. It is genuinely fun to collect them, and it invites you to learn more about the ecosystems of your neighborhood, as well as places you visit. The app is created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is fully free and has so far avoided any enshittification, which I am very glad for.

Perhaps the most interesting bit is that this little app has changed me in a meaningful way: I acquired quite a few books on birds and learned more than what the app itself can provide. I now jump with joy when I hear the first common swifts fly over our house in droves, screaming “sreeee” over each other. We rescued quite a few birds in distress, and we watched with delight and anticipation when a pair of blackbirds made a nest on our balcony; doubly so when we noticed that it’s the same pair we see each year at our bird feeder. Identifying a single bird’s call led me on a path that I could not have foreseen. So I urge you: give it a try. You might thank yourself in a year or two!