Bird and Plant Identification: Surprisingly Useful Apps

I am, by my own admission, a mediocre birder. I can tell a robin from a blue jay. Beyond that I get nervous. For thirty years I had a field guide on the shelf and consulted it about twice a year. Then in 2023 my granddaughter sat me down with an app called Merlin Bird ID, played a recording of birdsong from the back yard, and within three seconds the app told me there were four different species singing that I'd been ignoring my entire adult life.

This piece is about the apps that turn a phone into a quiet little wonder of the natural world. They're free. They're accurate. They are one of the best things smartphones can do that nothing else can.

Merlin Bird ID — for birds

Free. Made by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which is the major university research center for bird science in the United States. No advertisements. No subscription tier. Genuinely just a gift to the world.

What it does. You can identify a bird three ways: by sound (hold the phone in the direction of the birdsong; the app analyzes the audio and tells you which species is singing); by photograph (point the camera at a bird, take a photo, the app tells you what it is); or by description (answer five questions about size, color, location, behavior, and the app suggests likely matches).

The sound identification is the magical one. You sit on your back porch with a cup of coffee, open Merlin, tap Sound ID, and the phone listens. Within thirty seconds it'll have identified two or three species singing nearby. New ones appear as they sing.

Setup. Install Merlin. The app asks you to download a "Bird Pack" for your region — 200 megabytes or so. Wait for it to finish on Wi-Fi. Now the app works without an internet connection, which matters if your favorite birding spot is out where the cell signal isn't.

iNaturalist — for everything else

Made by the California Academy of Sciences and National Geographic. Free. Point your camera at a plant, an insect, a fungus, a tree leaf, a salamander, a butterfly — almost any living thing — and the app suggests identifications.

The accuracy is excellent for common species (oaks, maples, dandelions, mourning cloak butterflies). It's good for less common species in well-photographed regions. It can be wrong for very similar-looking species that even experts struggle to distinguish.

The community aspect, if you want it, is the secret weapon. When you photograph something and submit the observation, other naturalists can confirm or correct the identification. Your photographs also contribute to scientific research, which is a real thing — iNaturalist data has been used in hundreds of peer-reviewed studies about species ranges and climate change effects.

If the community aspect doesn't interest you, you don't have to participate. Just use the camera to look things up.

PlantNet — the focused alternative

If you only care about plants, PlantNet (made by a French scientific consortium) is more focused than iNaturalist and sometimes more accurate for plants specifically. Free. Same idea — point the camera, get the species name.

I use both. Different photographs give different results, and having two opinions sometimes settles it.

Seek — the simpler version

Also from iNaturalist, designed for younger users and casual identifiers. No account required, no upload to the community database, simpler interface. If iNaturalist feels overwhelming, Seek is the same engine without the social features. Great for visiting grandchildren who want to know what the bug they found is.

The one I would not trust for foraging

There are mushroom identification apps. Several of them. Some are reasonably accurate.

I will not trust any of them for anything I am planning to eat. The consequences of a mistake — there are mushrooms in North America that look almost identical to safe species and will destroy your liver in three days — are too severe for an app that occasionally gets things wrong.

For mushroom identification with safety on the line: take a class from a local mycological society. They exist in most US states. They're cheap or free. Mushrooms you've identified yourself, with a real expert nearby, are safe. Mushrooms an app identified are not.

The apps are fine for "what's this mushroom I saw on a walk?" if you're not planning to eat it. They are not fine for foraging.

The unexpected joy

The genuine surprise of these apps, in my experience, is that they expand what you notice. Once you can identify the birds in your back yard, you start paying attention to which ones are there in which seasons. Once you can identify the plants in your neighborhood, you notice the trees changing through the year. The natural world fills in around you in a way that's hard to articulate until you've had a few months of it.

My granddaughter visits less often than either of us would like. Every visit, though, we sit on the back porch with Merlin running, and the screen fills with names of birds we both knew about but didn't know we knew about. Last spring we identified a Western Tanager — orange head, yellow body, the most spectacular bird I'd ever seen in the yard — that I have lived next to for fourteen years and never properly seen.

I had to look it up to even know how rare they are around here. Apparently not particularly rare. I just hadn't been paying attention. The phone, in this small way, helped me to.

Written by Robert Sandoval. Last verified 19 June 2026.