Birding on the Web: New Site Helps You Identify Most Common Birds in U.S. and Canada

Birding will never be the same again, and it's because of your computer.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Visipedia research project have teamed up on an impressive new tool for bird-watchers and the bird-curious: a website that can identify hundreds of bird species by photo alone.

The site, called Merlin Bird Photo ID, is capable of recognizing 400 of the most commonly sighted birds in North America. Using computer vision technology, the site is currently in beta but according to Jessie Barry at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, "It gets the bird right in the top three results about 90 percent of the time, and it's designed to keep improving the more people use it. That's truly amazing, considering that the computer vision community started working on the challenge of bird identification only a few years ago."

The process is simple: a user uploads a photo of a bird, enters when and where the photo was taken, draws a box around the bird and then clicks on the bill, eye, and tail to help the tool discern its characteristics.

After a few seconds, the magic happens: Merlin analyzes the pixels, matches it with millions of data points, and presents a gallery of the most likely species, including photos and song.

The tool is remarkably accurate. It correctly identified the above bird (uploaded through the site) as a Western Meadowlark, and offered a recording of its song as well as a short description of its habit and habitat.

We tried a few different photos with Merlin Bird Photo ID, and it appears to work best with photos that prominently feature a bird's bill, eye, and tail (so, no front-facing shots or missing parts).

As more and more people use the site, the technology continues to improve. And this power of crowdsourcing is evident: Merlin has learned to recognize each species in its database from tens of thousands of photos already identified by birders. It also pulls information from the eBird.org database, which contains over 70 million sightings recorded by bird enthusiasts.

Merlin Bird Photo ID currently functions as a website only and cannot be used on mobile devices. As soon as the tool moves out of beta and becomes smartphone-ready, the team will add it to their existing Merlin Bird ID app for iPhone and Android users.

Read more about birds and birding:
The Secret World of Birders
Egrets
The Audubon Center