is there an app for identifying bird calls?

If you want a free all-rounder

Merlin Bird ID comes from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It is free, with no in-app purchases listed on the UK App Store, and Cornell says it stays free thanks to members and supporters. It identifies birds from sound and from photos, and you can also get to a name by answering a few questions or by exploring the birds of a region. Around that sits a field guide with ID tips, range maps, photos and calls for regions worldwide, powered by eBird, plus downloadable bird packs. Its sound ID is trained on eBird and Macaulay Library recordings.

The limit is the device. On the UK App Store it is listed for iPhone, Apple silicon Macs and Apple Vision, but not iPad, and it needs iOS 18 or later. If your phone is older, check that it qualifies before you plan a walk around it.

If you are often out of signal

BirdNET Live is BirdNET's newer app, and it runs BirdNET's sound ID model on the phone itself, so no internet connection is required. Detections show up in real time on a live spectrogram, and it adds timed point counts, surveys and batch analysis of audio files.

That depth has a cost in storage and complexity rather than money. It is built for researchers and serious birders, so it has many settings, and it is a 363.3 MB download on the UK App Store, needing iOS 16.6 or later. It is free on the UK App Store and Google Play.

If you want to help research

BirdNET is a research project from the Cornell Lab and Chemnitz University of Technology. You record a few seconds and get ranked species suggestions with confidence scores. The recordings you submit are used for research, speech is filtered out and sharing your location is optional. BirdNET's page calls the app fast and free, and both store listings show it as free.

One oddity: its pages give different species counts. The UK App Store says nearly 3,000, Google Play says more than 3,000 and BirdNET's own site says over 6,000, so treat any single figure with care.

If the recording is faint or distant

ChirpOMatic, sold as Spiny Software on the App Store and listed under Andy Knapp on Google Play, comes in four regional editions: Europe, North America, Caribbean and Australia. The Europe edition covers the UK, Ireland and the continent with a local species list. When a recording is faint, brief or distant, it gives a shortlist of likely matches with a High, Moderate or Low confidence label, so you can see how far to trust each suggestion. ChirpOMatic's site says the analyser, shortlist and spectrograms are free, with no account needed, but its Google Play Europe listing says the app is free for 14 days and then needs a £12.99 annual subscription.

If you bird on nature reserves

ChirpOMatic again, for a different reason. Its bird-safe mode uses the phone's distance sensor to play calls only when the phone is held close, so you can compare what you heard without broadcasting it across the reserve. That mode is iOS only. On Android, the Europe edition had 2.4 stars from 9 Google Play reviews, a small sample but not an encouraging one.

When paying is worth it

Each free option gives something up. Merlin narrows the devices you can use, BirdNET leaves you with inconsistent species counts, and BirdNET Live asks you to take on a researcher's toolkit. ChirpOMatic's iPhone app identifies for free, but keeping your recordings, the full reference library, the quiz and importing sound files all need Pro.

ChirpOMatic is the only one of the four that charges. On the UK App Store, Pro is an annual subscription with two PRO Yearly entries, £14.99 and £12.99, and a 7-day free trial; the same listing also shows a PRO weekly pass at £3.99 and 1 week of Pro at £2.99. On iPhone, pay only if you want to save and export recordings or use the library and quiz. On Android, the Europe edition is free for 14 days and then costs £12.99 a year to keep using, so the free apps above are the better start there.

ChirpOMatic says that in a test of 126 difficult recordings from bird ID forums, where Merlin had returned no result, it correctly identified 86.5%. That is the vendor's own test, not an independent one, so read it as a claim rather than a verdict.

Playing calls back in the open pulls birds off territory and, in the breeding season, off nests. ChirpOMatic suggests comparing sounds through earphones instead, which is sound practice whichever app you use.

Think about your recordings too. BirdNET licenses submitted recordings under CC BY SA 4.0 and uses them for research, so only submit what you are happy to share. On privacy, Merlin's UK App Store label lists some data linked to you, while BirdNET Live's label says the developer does not collect any data.