iNaturalist

iNaturalist is a social network for naturalists! Record your observations of plants and animals, share them with friends and researchers, and learn about the natural world.

iNaturalist

Similar category: Merlin Bird ID [1]. Uses audio to identify the birds around you.

[1] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

Merlin Bird ID - Home

Identify Bird Songs and Calls Sound ID listens to the birds around you and shows real-time suggestions for who’s singing. Compare your recording to the songs and calls in Merlin to confirm what you heard. Sound ID works completely offline, so you can identify birds you hear no matter where you ar

Merlin Bird ID - Free, instant bird identification help and guide for thousands of birds
Aaand if you like birds, Listers documentary is a lot of fun https://youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo
LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching

YouTube
The funny thing is I got into birds because of the app. I hike alone often. Identifying the bird and then challenging myself to identify it correctly from memory going forward (before double checking with the app) is a fun game that draws one into the environment. Then, once you remember the bird (or, in my case, whatever nickname I came up with) you start learning and remembering facts about the bird.
Even if you don't like birds... It's one of my favorite things I've ever watched.
Best movie of the year hands down
I'm a big fan of Merlin and learning more about its development changed my perspective on software development! I wrote about that here: https://digitalseams.com/blog/what-birdsong-and-backends-can...
What birdsong and backends can teach us about magic — Digital Seams

Who said you had to be reasonable?

Digital Seams
Thanks for sharing this. I love Merlin but never knew how they got it to be so good. Blood, sweat, and tears - of course - as everything actually valuable and useful requires.
There's Merlin and then there's Birdnet too https://birdnet.cornell.edu/. Both by Cornell.
BirdNET – AI-Powered Sound ID

I've been using birdnet, but it seems to want an internet connection to do the identification and sometimes that is dicey when there is a bird that I want to identify. (Also birds seem to shut up around the time you get the app open.)

I'm going to give Merlin a try - the app has UI to download the network for offline use.

Requiring an internet connection for a nature app is absurd. As annoying as it is I get why a big tech company like Google fails at this sort of thing, many of their employees probably never leave a city and so the products always work well for them. But a nature app has no excuse, normal usage will get blocked by that all the time.

birdnet pi or go run the model locally
with an option to push observations
back to Cornell

https://www.birdweather.com/birdnetpi

https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go

BirdNET-PI

BirdWeather