Megan Szostak, 26, was always a “bird kid”.<\/p>\n
The urge to watch and appreciate the world around her – and avians flitting in and out of it – has been ingrained in her since childhood, when she was given her grandfather’s binoculars after he died.<\/p>\n
Armed with this and a field guide in her home of San Francisco, she set about identifying birds from an early age. <\/p>\n
But in recent years, her birding toolbelt has expanded to include something far more modern – an app.<\/p>\n
“I had friends who probably wouldn’t describe themselves as birders, but more just curious about nature and the world around them, recommend it to me,” Megan said.<\/p>\n
She is one of many millions of people who have downloaded Merlin Bird ID, which claims to be able to identify almost any bird by its look, song or call.<\/p>\n
“I think that it’s been a really great tool that I’ve integrated into my birding routine,” she said.<\/p>\n
And whether down to heatwaves sending more people outdoors, or younger people delving into birding, these apps are booming in popularity.<\/p>\n
Chief among them is Merlin Bird ID, which was developed by Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology.<\/p>\n
It has been downloaded 12 million times in 2026 alone, according to director Jessie Barry – who says it has had 42 million downloads overall.<\/p>\n
She says the app has come a long way since it first launched in the US in 2014, with machine learning systems which could identify 285 common bird species from photos.<\/p>\n
A real feather in its cap at the time, but a decade or so on, and it can now identify 11,000 species of birds – around as many as exist in the world.<\/p>\n
Barry put the development down to AI, as well as “an amazing community of global bird watchers who are able to submit their recordings” – meaning more data to train the tech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Megan Szostak, 26, was always a “bird kid”. The urge to watch and appreciate the world around her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":713409,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[59,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-713408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-gb","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=713408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/713409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}