Essential Apps for Bird Identification, Tracking, and Community Building
By Ryan Mandelbaum
Birding is the act of experiencing birds for enjoyment. For me, it’s a way to disconnect from the stresses of daily life and the world at large. However—and maybe a little paradoxically—I’ve also learned that my phone can be a valuable tool for maximizing my enjoyment of birding and getting more involved in the birding community.
Developers have created applications to enhance every aspect of birding. There are apps to help you identify birds, either with reference images or with image or sound recognition models. There are apps that help you keep track of birds you’ve seen, and apps that connect you to the broader birding community. There are even apps that experts use to help predict the movements of migratory birds.
There’s no wrong way to bird, so long as you are enjoying yourself and respecting other living beings, avian, human, or otherwise. Plenty of birders opt to leave their phone at home and focus solely on what’s around them. However, if you do decide to stay connected, consider adding these apps to your phone’s home screen.
Table of Contents
- Best Apps for Identifying Birds
- Keep Track of Your Bird Sightings
- Join the birding community
- Extra Tools for Advanced Birders
- Explore Nature Beyond Birds
Best Apps for Identifying Birds
A field guide is the second purchase that most birders make, after their binoculars. A field guide is a collection of bird images with information about how to identify them, their habits, where they live, and information about the sounds that they make.
I love the feeling of flipping through a physical book, but I have found that phone apps are much more convenient for identifying birds in the field. Field guide apps allow you to search for species quickly, and you can apply filters to show only the most likely birds encountered in your area. Some apps even use artificial intelligence to help you identify bird species from photos or sounds.
Sibley Birds v2
Explore North America's birds with expert illustrations and tools.
The Sibley Birds app is the bird app I use most often. Sibley Birds is the app version of the The Sibley Guide to Birds, one of the most popular field guides to North American birds, authored and illustrated by ornithologist David Allen Sibley. At $19.99 it’s more expensive than any other app included in this article—but it contains the same content as the book in a conveniently portable format. Sibley Birds features illustrations of 930 bird species seen in North America, including different plumages and notes on the most important identifying features. It also includes sound recordings and comprehensive written descriptions about the bird’s habits, habitats, and range maps, plus the ability to filter birds by location or time of year. For me, the most valuable feature is the ability to compare any two bird species. Note that Sibley only covers North American birds north of Mexico—for birds in other parts of the world, you will need other location-specific apps.
Merlin
Identify birds effortlessly with AI-powered sound and photo tools.
Merlin Bird ID is a free bird guide developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology with powerful tools to help you identify birds. Instead of illustrations, Merlin relies on high-quality photos, and it still contains sound recordings, natural history information, and maps showing birds’ ranges. Unlike Sibley, which is limited to birds found in North America north of Mexico, Merlin can help you identify birds from anywhere in the world by downloading “Bird Packs” containing birds from specific locations. However, Merlin’s most powerful features are its machine-learning based bird identification tools. Sound ID listens to birdsong in real time and provides suggestions for the most likely species. Photo ID analyzes photos and offers a list of possible species And, if you don’t have a recording or photo, you can use the Bird ID Wizard which offers suggested species identifications by asking a series of questions.
Audubon Bird Guide
Discover, learn, and explore 800 North American bird species.
The Audubon Bird Guide is another free bird guide app with information on 800 North American bird species. Audubon Bird Guide features comprehensive information on how to identify birds, their range, sound recordings, and even information like the appearance of their nests and eggs. While the Audubon Bird Guide app doesn’t incorporate artificial intelligence, it also has a Bird ID tool that can help you identify birds by answering questions about their size, color, behavior, and habitat. Finally, it incorporates data from the eBird database so you can explore what kinds of birds are nearby.
Keep Track of Your Bird Sightings
After learning to identify birds, many birders start keeping a list of birds that they’ve seen. You might keep lists of birds you’ve seen in your life, birds you’ve seen this year, birds you’ve seen in your local park, or you may not keep any lists at all! But for those keeping track, there are popular apps that provide valuable features and even contribute to science.
eBird Mobile
Track your sightings and contribute to global bird science.
The eBird Mobile app is the free app version of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird tool. eBird is a community science database of bird sightings submitted by birders around the world, integrated with Cornell’s expansive Macaulay Library of photos and sound recordings.The eBird Mobile app is how you submit your sightings—while you’re out in the field, you start a checklist, and then record the number of individuals of each bird species you encounter. Then, you review the amount of time you’ve birded and the distance you traveled and submit the list. That information updates your own bird stats in your app, but also feeds into the eBird database. eBird offers a suite of tools to explore this database, including maps of where birds have been seen, overall bird lists for locations, and alert systems so you can receive an email when other birders have found a rare bird or a bird you haven’t seen in your area.
iGoTerra
Organize your wildlife lists and reach your birding goals.
iGoTerra is a powerful tool and database to keep track of nature sightings and photos, featuring a free version and two paid subscription tiers. iGoTerra is popular with list-focused and competitive wildlife enthusiasts—Peter Kaestner, the first birder to see 10,000 bird species, uses both eBird to submit his sightings for community science and iGoTerra to keep track of his own sightings. You can create and submit lists with the iGoTerra Pocket mobile app which feeds into the iGoTerra database, so you can view your lists and compare them to other users’. iGoTerra provides listing functionality beyond eBird, such as access to different overarching taxonomical bird lists, the ability to differentiate between heard-only and seen birds, and lists of target families and target genuses. It also contains valuable tools for those who travel to see birds, allowing you to create personal target species lists. And it’s not limited to birds, so you can keep lists of mammals, insects, plants, and more.
Join the birding community
Birding can be something you do solo, with just a few friends, or as part of a group. Once you decide to join a community, you will encounter a new set of apps for connecting, receiving real-time alerts about rare birds, asking questions, and organizing meetups. Many local birding communities maintain online groups that live on one of these apps. The best way to learn about these communities is by introducing yourself to other local birders, joining walks led by local experts, or connecting with local birders on social media.
Join birding groups, share sightings, and stay connected.
WhatsApp is a free private messaging service owned by Meta. Whatsapp allows you to send encrypted text, photo, audio, and video messages to individuals or groups. Birders create WhatsApp groups to share rare bird sightings, organize meetups, or even just to chat. Some WhatsApp groups may have dozens of members and a moderator who enforces rules, while others are just informal groups of friends. WhatsApp also allows you to communicate with anyone in the world with internet access. You can use WhatsApp to contact guides in foreign countries to organize tours, or with friends who may be in remote areas with internet but no cellular service.
Discord
Connect with birders in your community and beyond in real-time.
Discord is a chatroom service where users gather in servers organized into topic-based channels. As the popularity of birding has grown, so has the need for birders to connect at all levels—in special-interest groups, in county-wide groups, and in state-wide groups. Many of these groups maintain Discord servers to organize their real-time conversations. You can create your own server to gather your own birding friends, or join a local birding server. In the United States, state-specific Discord servers are increasing in popularity, offering forums for birders to connect with other birders in their area, share county-level and state-level rarities, and quickly disseminate information. Getting added to your local bird Discord server usually requires connecting with local birders, first—start by introducing yourself to other birders, joining local bird walks, or looking for birders on Facebook, where many local birding groups maintain pages.
Extra Tools for Advanced Birders
The above apps should offer you useful tools for identifying birds, keeping track of the birds you have seen, and connecting with other birders. However, there are other apps that can help you take things to the next level—apps that help you predict the movement of birds or extend your nature observation hobby to other life forms.
Windy
Plan your birding adventures with detailed weather insights.
Windy is an expansive free weather app with paid premium services offering multiple weather models, information on wind speed and direction at different altitudes, cloud cover, precipitation, and wave height. Sure, the weather can help you decide how to dress. But it also governs how many birds decide to migrate, broader-scale bird vagrancy events where birds travel beyond their expected range, or what areas will concentrate migratory birds stopping for a day’s rest. Many birders use Windy to decide where to go birding every morning.
RadarScope
Track bird migration in real-time with professional radar data.
RadarScope is a paid app that offers real-time access to global weather radar data for $9.99. Migrating birds appear on weather radar—weather radar is how the Cornell Lab of Ornithology creates its forecast of migratory bird activity, called BirdCast (an excellent and free online resource but not an app, so outside this article’s scope). RadarScope images show native radar data with a high level of detail so you can see both weather phenomena and the effects of migrating birds.
Voice Memos
Record bird calls and save your field observations easily.
Voice Memos for iOS and Android’s Voice Recorder app are free apps which come with your phone, which you can use to record the sounds of birds you hear in the field. Voice recording apps can be a valuable tool for documenting birds in the field, especially if you don’t need help identifying the sound and just want to save it for your records. You can export these recordings and add them to your eBird checklists.
Explore Nature Beyond Birds
iNaturalist and Seek
Identify and document nature, from birds to fungi, anywhere.
iNaturalist is a nonprofit nature observing platform, social network, crowdsourced species identification system, and community science database for the observation of life. The iNaturalist app allows you to upload photos of plants, animals, fungi, and even microscopic life, and offers a suggested identification with the help of image recognition tools. These sightings feed into the iNaturalist database, where experts and enthusiasts can suggest refined identifications. You can also see other observations nearby, and when you get home, participate in discussions about biology, ecology, and community science. For those looking for a more approachable species identification tool, Seek by iNaturalist offers identification based on image recognition technology and lets you keep a list of your sightings with a simpler interface.
Elevate Your Birding Experience
Remember—birding doesn’t require any tools—you can head out with just your binoculars, or even just your eyes or ears. However, these apps have increased my appreciation for birds and the natural world at large, improved my avian knowledge, and connected me to birders around the world. I hope that they can help elevate your birding experience, too.