Is there a bird watching app like Pokemon Go?

Yes, though no single app does everything. The closest match to the Pokémon Go loop is Warble, a free iPhone game where you catch real birds by recording their song and collect them as cards in a 100-bird album for your state, with rarities from real sighting data. For a list that grows every time you go out, Merlin Bird ID and eBird keep free life lists. Seek by iNaturalist awards badges for photographing plants and animals.

What people mean by a Pokémon Go for birds

Pokémon Go launched on July 6, 2016, for iPhone and Android. Niantic ran it until 2025, when Scopely took over publishing. GPS puts your avatar on a map that moves as you walk, creatures turn up nearby, and you flick a Poké Ball to catch them. Many players chase one goal above all: a complete Pokédex. It is free to play, earns its money from in-app purchases, and passed a billion downloads by February 2019.

It also got people walking. Studies summarized on its Wikipedia page found players added an average of 194 steps a day after they started. For many, that was the real appeal: a reason to take the long way home.

So a bird app like Pokémon Go usually means some mix of four things:

• Catching. You find something and it becomes yours.
• Collecting. A list with visible gaps, so you know what is missing.
• Rarity. Common finds and prizes, so some mornings are better than others.
• A reason to go outside. The walk is the point, even if nobody says so.

Birds already supply all four. The difference is that nothing spawns for you. A bird sings when it feels like it, and you have to be there to hear it.

Warble: catch real birds by their song

Warble is the most literal answer: a free iPhone game built around live sound identification. When a bird sings, you tap the green button and the phone listens. If it can name the species, the bird becomes a card in an album of 100 birds for your state. There is an album for each of the 50 states and Washington, DC, drawn from 800 US species.

Each card is common, uncommon, rare or legendary, set state by state from GBIF observation data, so a bird that is everywhere in one state can be a real find two states over. You get one free catch a day, which makes it a morning habit rather than a binge; Warble Pro removes the limit for $3.99 a week or $19.99 a year. No ads, no accounts, and the sound is never uploaded.

It works offline after a one-time download of about 100 MB. The limits: iPhone only (iOS 17 or later), US birds only, sound only with no photo identification, and it can be unsure when wind or traffic drowns out the bird. The biggest difference from Pokémon Go is the one birders care about most: you cannot catch a bird that is not really there.

Merlin Bird ID: a free life list

Merlin Bird ID, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is the reference identifier, and it is free. It offers four routes to a name: answer a few questions, upload a photo, record a singing bird, or browse the birds of a region. Sound ID recognizes more than 2,000 species.

Merlin is not a game and does not pretend to be: no rarities, no album. It does keep a life list, a personal list of the birds you save, and for many people that list is the collection.

eBird: the birder's own collecting game

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society launched eBird in 2002, and it is free. Its core idea is the checklist: go out, count what you find, submit the list. Your life list updates on its own each time, and you can view your records as maps, graphs and bar charts.

Serious listers treat this as the real game, with stakes Pokémon Go never had. The observations passed a billion records in May 2021, and scientists have used them to study migration routes and how ranges shift with a changing climate. eBird does not identify anything for you, though. You need to know what you saw before you add it.

Seek: badges for anything alive

Seek by iNaturalist, from the nonprofit behind iNaturalist, is the other app built like a game. Point the camera at a plant, animal or mushroom and image recognition suggests what it is, from roughly 80,000 species. Observations earn badges, there are monthly challenges, and you do not have to register.

It is free, and its reviews are full of families. For birds it has one catch: it works from pictures, so the bird has to sit still in the frame. A bird singing inside a hedge is easy to hear and hard to photograph.

How they compare

Good first catches

The first birds on any list are the loud, familiar ones near the house. In Warble these two turn up almost everywhere: the American Robin is in 50 of the 51 albums and a common card in 46, and the Northern Cardinal is common in 38 of the 39 albums that include it.

Which one should you get?

• You want the catching and collecting. Warble, the only one here built as a catch-and-collect game around bird song.
• You want to know what every bird is, for free. Merlin, which also keeps your life list.
• You want your lists to count for science. eBird, with Merlin helping you put names to things.
• You have kids who photograph everything. Seek, for bugs and flowers too.

Plenty of people run two of these side by side: Warble for the reason to step outside at seven in the morning, Merlin or eBird for the record you keep.

Get Warble free

Questions people ask

Warble is a game, not a field guide. Where this page states a fact about a bird, it comes from the sources above.