Birding with Insight: Cornell Lab Tools for Better Birding

At a presentation at the Biggest Week in American Birding, we demonstrated a few different tools that can help you enjoy birds, identify them, know how many are migrating, and find any birds of special interest in your local area and when you travel. This page compiles those links for you as a handy reference. Thanks for attending the workshop!

Merlin Bird ID

Our free bird identification app works like a virtual field guide and can help you ID birds from sounds, photos, or by answering 5 basic questions about what you saw. Here’s more about Merlin Bird ID.

Birds Near Me

This feature is built into All About Birds. It provides lists of likely species for any location in the U.S. and Canada. You can filter the list using a Merlin-like interface, so it’s great for bird ID as well as for planning for the birds you might see on upcoming trips. Try out Birds Near Me now or find it anytime via the button in the search bar.

eBird Animated Abundance Maps

These fascinating maps show where a species can be found each week of the year. You can play the map like an animation to watch how the bird’s range ebbs and flows across the year. You can also view the map one week at a time to explore their range in detail.

Visit eBird Status and Trends, search for a species and then select “Weekly” from the menu at the top.

BirdCast

This project uses weather radar to estimate how many birds will be in flight each night during the migration season. It can also tell you how many birds flew over your home state or county each night, and what birds to expect. It’s fascinating to see the sheer scale of migration, and to get advance notice of what birding might be like for your area over the next few days.

eBird Mobile

Thousands of birders use the free eBird Mobile app to keep track of their birding outings. But it’s also an incredible tool for finding birds, even if you don’t want to use it to enter checklists. Here’s more about eBird Mobile.

eBird Essentials

This free course from Bird Academy will introduce you to eBird and go over how to start using it to save checklists, notes, and media of the birds you find; as well as best practices for entering data so that it’s useful for science and conservation analyses.

Ways to Help Birds

Try the Seven Simple Actions to Help Birds, and learn about window safety via the Bird Collision Prevention Alliance.

By caring about birds and sharing your knowledge and enthusiasm with others, you are helping raise the profile of birds and conservation. eBird also provides a way to participate in conservation science by contributing your observations to the global eBird database. Thank you.