Isn’t it wonderful to hear the birds singing? Being immersed in their springtime symphony makes you feel good to be alive, even if you can’t tell a crow’s “caw” from a cuckoo’s “coo-coo”.

I don’t go out of my way to spot birds, but I enjoy listening to and watching them. You might be amazed how many different bird species are around you, though you may never see them. Identifying them by sight or sound used to mean riffling through guidebooks, but it’s much simpler now we have smartphones!

I’ve been impressed with the free Merlin ID app over a couple of years of use. Available for Android and Apple devices, Merlin enables you to identify a bird in three ways: by answering simple questions (sometimes with disappointing results), by uploading a photo or by capturing a sound recording.

It’s Merlin’s ability to identify birds from their sounds, in real time, that especially impressed me: just open the app, hit the “Sound ID” button and let it listen. Merlin identifies the birds it finds in real time, using audio recognition based on its database of sound recordings. It ignores background noise and can cope with lots of birds singing at the same time.

It’s surprising how many different bird species can be in voice within a soundscape. My wife set Merlin listening while we were walking through the woodland fringes of Whitmoor Common last week, and it identified 15 species in 15 minutes, including a great spotted woodpecker hammering its “rat-tat-tat” and a firecrest (a rarely seen bird I wrote about two weeks ago).

She did the same in our Goldsworth Park garden and it identified 12 species during half an hour – impressive, eh?

Merlin displays a list of the birds it finds and highlights each on-screen while it is singing, which can help you identify and learn individual bird calls within a busy soundscape. However, you may not be able to see a specific bird because Merlin doesn’t tell you where to look, whereas our two ears provide a stereo “image” that enables us to locate sources by turning our heads.

The Merlin Bird ID app was hatched at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a part of Cornell University in the US. Launched in 2014 it follows Cornell Lab’s earlier apps, eBird and BirdNET, which are not only useful tools for keen bird spotters but also citizen science platforms: users contribute to their huge photo and databases.

Put simply, eBird has the world’s largest database of bird sightings, while BirdNet is a sound recording app. Both run with artificial intelligence (AI) and their resources are used by the Merlin app to identify birds.

Merlin was initially provided with a single database of birds found in North America but many regional databases are now available. You can download these to your phone via the app, then switch between them.

There is a database dedicated to Britain and Ireland and also a Europe-wide database that includes Britain and Ireland; using the former can improve accuracy by narrowing the choice of species to those more likely to be seen and heard in Britain.

There’s no better way to discover how the Merlin app can enhance your birdwatching adventures than to try it yourself – it’s free!

If you discover something special please email me: [email protected]