Hi Carolina—Yes! We are seeking funding to enable Merlin to identify more species. Right now, it’s reasonably accurate in helping people identify 400 of the most commonly encountered birds in North America. App users have confirmed 1.1 million bird identifications using Merlin! Now we’d like to “teach” Merlin how to recognize more species in North America, including Mexico. Ultimately it would be our dream to include all 10,404 bird species in the world.

Fantastic! I am so inspired by Justin and all the brilliant young people who are out making discoveries in the natural world and who are working to protect it. How did Justin first get interested in birds?

Hi Gilly—for me, there were three main take-home messages. The first is that novices and beginners who used Merlin perceived greater gains in bird observation and ID skills than a control group. Comments in interviews suggested that they found it easier to use than a traditional field guide, and Merlin taught them key characteristics to observe when identifying birds. This makes us wonder whether using Merlin could lead to increased confidence. The second is that the mobile version was highly preferred over the web version. 40% of study participants who had access to both never even bothered to try the web version! We thought this was an urgent reminder of how quickly the world is switching to mobile, and especially how useful mobile interactions are when looking at something outside! Finally, the biggest request was that participants wanted to record their sightings in a checklist. We are excited because if we can enable these sightings to be stored in the eBird citizen-science project, this may create a welcoming entree for novices and beginners to step into citizen science.

This is wonderful! Cannot but congratulate you and your team on the amazing work. Who were your participants? How were they selected? What other impacts on participants have you tried detecting?

Hi, May. Beginning and novice bird watchers were the focus of our evaluation. We recruited them through Master Naturalist programs, Master Gardener programs, CREW Land and Water Trust in Florida, and Cornell Lab of Ornithology Facebook followers. Interested individuals were asked to fill out an online survey with questions that enabled us to sort into stratified random control and treatment groups. We selected participants who said they could identify roughly 50 species or less. Participants were asked to watch birds at least once a month for three months. In addition to finding that Merlin users had greater self-reported gains in bird observation and identification skills, we learned through post-survey telephone interviews that participants were articulate and concrete about how Merlin trained them to focus on specific characteristics, often different from those they had used before. We tried to measure whether increases in skill could be detected with a 13-question bird photo identification quiz taken before and after the study period. This quiz did not yield significant differences between the two groups; however, it is possible that the length or amount of participation was not long enough to develop skills that could be detected by such a quiz. We also wanted to evaluate whether the use of Merlin would lead to greater exploration of information on birds. The results showed that 73% of Merlin users went on to explore more information about birds through the Cornell Lab’s online resources, compared with 39% for the control group. It was encouraging to us that 90% of those who used the app said they would use it again.

Wonderful! A million thanks for the clear explanation Miyoko.

Thanks for downloading the app, Charles. I hope it helps with a few new bird identifications this spring!

I have a patio full of birds right now and I’m using the app. I love it.

Hi Charles – it’s a product we are very proud of and hope you find easy and fun to use!

Hi David! In the bird world, the holy grail would be to have the app identify bird song. Many companies are trying to develop this capability for their own apps, but it’s been a challenge. It seems like a complex song on the radio would be much harder to recognize than a couple of seconds of a single bird singing, but the radio plays a song exactly the same way each time. Bird song can be variable, and all the noise around it—other birds singing, noise from traffic, barking dogs, etc. can really confuse the computer. One person explained it like this—if you shout at Siri while the music is playing, or if you play the song on your guitar instead of the radio, Siri’s accuracy goes way down. The technology is advancing quickly, though, so bird song ID will be in our future some day! Meanwhile we have made better progress on photo ID—we are now beta testing a feature that identifies the bird in your photo using computer vision.

Cheryl,

Right now we’re focusing our efforts on developing Merlin for iOS and Android platforms, as those are currently our best opportunities to reach a wide and diverse audience.

The photo ID tool currently in beta testing that Miyoko mentioned in an earlier reply, has been designed for the web though, and is compatible with Chrome and Firefox browsers on both Mac and PC computers.

Scott,
Thank you for the information. I have a Windows cell phone and would really love it if Merlin were available as I am a big fan of the platform, having switched from an iPhone to this device. Again, thanks for the response.

Hi Cheryl, we do hope to develop Merlin on mobile-optimized web pages, so when this becomes available, you should be able to use it on your Windows phone through a web browser. Thanks so much for your interest in using Merlin!!

Miyoko,
Thank you for letting me know about the development process toward a mobile-optimized web pages. Can not wait to use Merlin on my phone!

Hi Chris – so glad you were able to use Merlin successfully. We worked hard to make it easy and fun, and novice birders are the ideal audience for this version of Merlin. As it gets smarter and more birds are added, we think it will be a great tool for all types of birders!

I think there are a lot of us who are keeping our fingers crossed for this capability. It is only a matter of time.

Hi John. You bring up a really good point about the challenges of creating and maintaining mobile apps. It takes considerable investment to accomplish the programming for each different platform, then continued investment to to ensure the app keeps working every time the mobile device companies upgrade their operating systems. It is a real struggle for nonprofit organizations such as ours to keep up even with just the iOS and Android platforms. However, we want the app to be used as widely used as possible, so we hope to develop a mobile-friendly web version that you would be able to use with any device that can browse web pages. Thanks for asking—we appreciate your interest!