The Best Apps for Instantly Identifying Birds and Beasts
Excerpt from this Wall Street Journal article:
If you’ve ever hiked through the woods with one of those savants who can identify every plant, every tree, every berry, bug and birdsong, you know it can be a revelation. When we’re alone in the trees with our ignorance, however, nature remains an inscrutable beauty.
It needn’t be. On recent walks through Alabama forests and Brooklyn cemeteries, I experimented with apps that use my smartphone’s camera and microphone—plus cloud-based machine learning technology—to identify plants and animals around me as quickly as Shazam can recognize a deservedly obscure Adam Ant song.
I now know a nightmarish-looking red mushroom I saw pushing its way through the grass was an “Elegant Stinkhorn.” And that the avian chorus crooning at my window each morning and interrupting my sleep isn’t just a bunch of stupid birds; it’s a bunch of stupid “house sparrows.” Here, three free apps to demystify flora, fauna, and fine feathered frenemies.
BirdNET: BirdNET lets you record snippets of song and upload them for instant analysis. It can match your recordings with those of the birds in its database—soon to top 1,000 species. The app displays its findings, its level of certainty and a link to the creature’s Wikipedia page. Available for Android.
Seek: Seek analyzes whatever you point your phone’s camera at, working its way up the tree of life in real time—revealing the kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and finally species. Available for iOS and Android.
Merlin: This app offers two avenues for ornithological identification; either snap a photo and submit it, or just answer a few basic questions about the bird in question. Available for iOS and Android.