you have permission to start birding without knowing anything about identifying birds
Literally just google [color] [size] bird with [anything distinct] in [general location] and you’ll find a name pretty consistently. (Merlin is also a really good app for this!)
Also, knowing what birds are which is not a prerequisite for enjoying them! I mostly share Merlin and Ebird because they are fun for me to use and the stats from them fuel the datasets for the Cornell Ornithology Lab.
LMFAO looks like the guy telling lies in the replies blocked me for saying Merlin is not generative AI instead of responding at all so I'm just going to reiterate it in a reblog: Merlin is NOT generative AI and does not hallucinate, the audio and image identification tools are analytical AI that can have categorization errors because it is not perfect and not advertised as such, it is meant as a tool and not as a replacement for human judgment. Merlin is a great bird identification tool!
All of its data is sourced in the Macaulay Library of media donated for scientific research - none of the media in the training dataset was stolen. Because it's not a LLM or image generating AI, it does not use any more water or electricity than was required for the training process, which is negligible compared to genAI and still negligible compared to the resource use required to maintain the servers that host the Macaulay Library (and eBird or iNat for that matter) to begin with. After it's downloaded onto your phone the only resources consumed are those used when you charge your phone.
I'm not a fan of generative AI slop either but calling Merlin "slop" is just Going On The Internet Telling Lies. The data used for the Merlin AI is confirmed by humans to be representing the correct species before it's used in the dataset - back when Merlin was first developing its visual ID in 2017 I was one of the volunteers confirming species identification and drawing boxes around birds in Macaulay Library photos.
I promise I actually know what I'm talking about, I identify hundreds of species of birds in field surveys professionally as a field biologist and I have also trained other biologists how to identify hundreds of species of birds. Merlin is fine as long as you don't treat it as infallible lol. It's free, audio ID generates spectrograms which by itself justifies its existence, and besides the AI elements it's an excellent digital field guide, so go have fun playing with it and use it as the teaching tool it is intended to be.
HMU anytime if you want more resources on learning to identify North American birds! Merlin is a good place to start but there's plenty more out there too.