With a photo, and a computer, you can identify birds.

You’re wandering around on a spring day in Shenandoah National Park and you see a bird fluttering around at Big Meadows. You snap a photograph and the bird disappears. Your field guide isn’t helping much. There are just too many birds that look alike. Now, what do you do?

At the risk of being cliché: there’s now an app for that.

The good folks at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have given us Merlin Photo ID, a bird identification app that looks at your picture and (ideally) tells you what your bird is.  

I’m not going to pretend to understand the algorithms and artificial intelligence that go into something like this. All I want to know is one thing: does it work?

The answer is a resounding, “Very well!…sometimes!”

Merlin has accurately identified several difficult shorebirds and had no problem nailing a male Rose-breasted Grosbeak. It also identified a juvenile Bald Eagle as such from a backlit photo from a birder here in Michigan.

On the other hand, I gave it a nice profile photo of a Blackburnian Warbler and it told me it was either a Black-capped Chickadee or a Hooded Merganser. So, when the app fails, it appears to fail hard!

In Merlin’s defense it is a beta version and it’s a work in progress. With each use the app learns how to identify birds better. Why not give it a hand and run some bird photos – good or bad – through the app? Let me know what kind of results you get.

Merlin Photo ID also flubbed one other call – it identified a picture of me as a Barred Owl. I’m not complaining, though. I take that as a compliment.

Note: This application is not yet available for download to use on mobile devices. You have to visit the website to use it.