My Favourite Nature Apps To ID Birds, Plants, Stars & More

Some of my friends are obsessed with their Duolingo streak. Others do crosswords to keep their minds sharp. My educational obsession? Learning the names of the birds, plants, trees and stars around me. 

Plus, learning how to ID the plants and animals that surround you—even in downtown Toronto!—won’t just enrich your own life. For me, it’s only increased my desire to help preserve the natural world these amazing creatures also call home. 

Here are the apps I use to deepen my knowledge and love of nature:

Merlin

This app can ID what bird is singing—like a Shazam for birds! It can also walk you through a series of questions to help you ID birds by sight (ie, size, colour, what the bird was doing). 

Seek

Take a picture of a plant or an animal and Seek will ID it for you, using data from iNaturalist, a global community of observers. (If you have an iPhone, you can also take a photo of the object and use Visual Look Up to search for what it is, I sometimes try this if I’m not getting the right results with Seek. Android lets you do this too. But I like how Seek lets me log the plants I’ve seen.)

Larkwire

This was recommended to me by the biologist Emily Rondel when I was a baby birder, and it’s my absolute favourite. It lets you learn bird songs by ear, ranging from easy to expert. The first course, featuring common backyard birds, is free. After that you pay a yearly subscription—I pay $58 a year for the all-you-can-eat plan, but a more basic one is $32 a year. I once screamed in the car when I moved from beginner to intermediate (no, I wasn’t driving); moving from intermediate to advanced is already one of the highlights of my year. 

Sky Tonight

Open this app up, point it at the sky, and it will tell you what stars you’re looking at. I’m amazed at what I can see even in Toronto, and love being able to confirm that yes, Venus *is* that bright “star” in the western sky. 

eBird

eBird Canada is managed by Birds Canada and is a collaborative project between The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and QuébecOiseaux. Once you have an account, it lets you log the species you’ve seen—and also help out scientists, conservation and our feathery friends too. Plus, you can see what birds are being spotted near you—and where.

Sibley

The app version of the beloved illustrated Sibley Guides, it has all the info from the print version plus bird songs, plus you can set it to your geographical region in Canada or the U.S. to help narrow your identifications. (Note: it costs $25, but is well worth it!)

My Aurora Forecast Pro

Seeing the Northern Lights is a goal of mine, and this app will alert you if a sighting is likely in your area. (I upgraded to the paid version for $4 because the ads on the free app were driving me nuts.) It also shows you a map of likely sighting spots, plus where users report seeing the aurora.

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