I’ve been using the Merlin bird ID app for several years and often recommend it to friends. It listens to the nature sounds around you and uses AI to identify the tweets, chirps, and whistles of the birds calling and singing. I have a garden ticklist to which I add the IDs the app records in a separate list. Merlin includes a bird photo ID component, which works a bit like iNaturalist’s Seek or Google Lens, but just for birds and better. The app works for birds anywhere in the world and is simple to use…but…
Since the app’s last major redesign and update I’ve noticed it seems to ignore some birdsong even though I can very clearly hear them and later on the recording the app saves. So, that’s become rather annoying. I also find that if I let Merlin run past its usual 10 minutes, a much longer recording will usually crash the app when trying to load and analyse the sound file.
I’m not sure what’s going on, Cornell Uni, the creators of the app need to get these issues sorted. Until then, I have sought a replacement and found BirdUp. BirdUp does the same kind of sonogram analysis as Merlin, but seems to pick up more in the tests I’ve run this morning in the garden. Unlike Merlin, it lists in sequence what it hears and doesn’t collate the soundings into a shortlist, which makes the timeline seem fussy.
However, with each sound it picks up you get more immediate details (sound volume, likelihood of that bird being the one it reports, and also details about the sound itseld and the frequencies the birds call or sing at). Speaing of which, unlike Merlin, BirdUp defines the bird sound as call or song and in some cases even offers a description. On one of my long test recordings from a previous Merlin session, it was picking up Robins and labelled the first few sounds as the call, but then a subsequent sound was flagged as a Robin’s alarm call. It picked up the “ping” call of Chaffinch, the “wheezy song” of Greenfinch, and “rattle call” of Great Tit, as opposed to the other types of call and song these birds produce.
Additionally, I’ve been able to run some of those over-long sound files from Merlin using BirdUp and getting a decent list of what was around at the time. Some of those files were from our biology field trip holiday to northern Greece and Lake Kerkini in 2024, so it’s nice to be able to pluck out the Cirl Bunting, Golden Oriole, and Nightingales from those files.
The bottom line is that Merlin doesn’t seem to work as well for me as it had over the years and while I still recommend it, I’m going to switch to BirdUp for regular use and check back in with Merlin periodically to see if there has been a major update to improve the issues I’m experiencing.