Smartphone Apps
Become more familiar with the animals and plants around you with these free and easy-to-use apps
A number of free smartphone apps are available which help people identify animals and plants that they see (and hear, in the case of birds). Two of the best ones are “Merlin” and “iNaturalist”.
Merlin is a free smartphone app developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It is the best app out there that identifies birds by their song.
Once installed on your smartphone, Merlin is super easy to use. All you have to do to use it is to open the app and then click on the “Sound ID” button. Merlin will then start identifying all of the birds it hears.
You can save your sessions so you can go back over time and see what you heard on what day, time, and location. It even saves the entire audio recording of each session.
You can also learn a lot of each species you hear, keeps a life list, and more. There are lots of other handy features that Merlin has, but this should get you started for now!
Another great app is iNaturalist. As with Merlin, iNaturalist is a free smartphone app that has a huge number of users. It is the most popular app out there to identify animals and plants from photos you take with your smartphone.
Once installed on your smartphone, iNaturalist easy to use. All you have to do to use it is to open the app and then select a photo(s) of a given animal or plant that you took. You can also choose to submit the location you took the photo at, to help iNaturalist better determine what it is. Then select “What did you see?”.
iNaturalist will then return one or multiple suggestions of what it thinks it is. While not perfect, it does a really good job at identifying what the animal or plant likely is.
It even has a feature that allows you to compare your photo (at the top) to a set of photos of that species that it has suggested. This allows you to better assess which of the suggested species it likely is.
You can save all of your observations and keep track of all the different species you’ve observed over time. It even saves each of the photos your submitted for each observation, so you can access those later. There are lots of other handy features that iNaturalist has, but this should be enough to get the fun started for you!
Indigo Bunting singing (by @garrett_meiners)
With these two apps you will find your eyes and ears atuned to a whole new world around you. Even just in your backyard, or as you take a walk down your street, go on your favorite nature hike, or anywhere you go. You will be amazed at the diversity of animals and plants you will be able to identify with these apps!
Halloween Pennant dragonfly (by @brave_otter_biology)
These are just two of a large number of nature identification apps that are out there. There are apps to identify wildlife tracks, trees by photo(s) of their bark, and so much more.