Tech Savvy
A few years back I was leading my annual bird photography workshop on the coast of Florida when we found ourselves waist-deep in the turquoise waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The morning sun danced on the water, and our cameras were trained on a swirling vortex of wings. Royal terns flared their crests in courtship; sandwich terns darted between them like missiles. Black skimmers, those bizarre birds with an oversized underbite carved the sky in fast-motion dogfights. Ruddy turnstones and red knots skittered across the sand, while a reddish egret flailed through the shallows like it had already downed three margaritas before sunrise.
The “drunken dance” of the Reddish Egret (Egretta rufescens) is referred to as canopy feeding, but most know it as the Drunken Sailor Dance. This behavior involves the egret dashing, spinning, flapping, and abruptly halting as it chases fish through shallow water. It frequently extends its wings like a canopy to shade the water—reducing glare and startling prey. This erratic, almost comical dance is a hallmark of the species and helps distinguish it from more stately waders like Great and Snowy Egrets. While there’s no formal scientific term for the “dance” itself beyond active foraging or canopy feeding, it’s one of the most iconic hunting strategies in North American wading bird behavior.
To our right, a squadron of brown pelicans dive-bombed a school of fish. Overhead, ospreys scanned the sea like airborne snipers. It was less a beach and more a feathered Grand Central Station.
And then came the inevitable questions from workshop clients, voiced with perfect sincerity:
“What’s that funny-looking black bird?”
“What about the little brown one under the feet of the big white one, but not the really big white one?”
Bird photography isn’t like photographing elk. In Yellowstone, no one asks what a moose is. But among shorebirds, waders, gulls, and terns, where size, color, and plumage nuance blend into chaos, it’s easy to get lost.
Birds have always required more fieldcraft than mammals. They’re smaller. They move faster. Their plumage changes with age, sex, and season. And for photographers, proper identification isn’t just a matter of curiosity: it’s a matter of credibility. Whether you’re keywording for stock, posting to social, or publishing a photo essay, knowing your subject is non-negotiable.
You wouldn’t fly to Havana, only to label your photographs “Some City Somewhere.”
And yet, many of us, myself included, have been humbled by a warbler in molt, a suspiciously similar sandpiper, or bird out of place.
Enter Merlin: Your Personal AI Bird Nerd
Developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Merlin Bird ID has become one of the most indispensable tools in my kit. It’s free, well designed, and remarkably accurate.
It offers three identification methods relevant to wildlife photographers:
Browse birds by location and season
Answer a few basic ID questions
Take a photo - or better yet, take a photo of a photo
That last one has revolutionized my post-processing workflow. I can pull up an image in Lightroom, point my phone at the screen, and Merlin will scan it, analyze shape, color, and plumage, and return an ID for me within seconds.
I’ve tested it against tropical species, warblers, shorebirds, and even nightjars which are notorious for tripping up seasoned birders. Merlin’s success rate always shocks me.
Take the time I double-checked an old photo I had labeled (and sold many times) as a chuck-will’s-widow (Antrostomus carolinensis). Merlin looked at it and said, flatly, Common Nighthawk (Chordeiles minor). No hesitation.
I spent the next hour flipping through field guides and came to a startling conclusion: it was right.
It had identified subtle features that I’d missed for years. That correction sent me digging through thousands of images. Fortunately, the nighthawk was my only misfire. But it could’ve been worse.
While Merlin dominates when it comes to bird ID, it’s far from the only tool in the digital naturalist’s toolkit. In fact, for the more ecologically curious, and for photographers working across taxa, iNaturalist is just as critical.
Built through a partnership between the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, iNaturalist is a community-powered platform for recording, sharing, and verifying observations of life on Earth. It doesn’t just help you ID birds, however. It helps you track everything: frogs, snakes, insects, wildflowers, even lichens.
What makes iNaturalist so powerful is that your observations also contribute directly to scientific research and biodiversity mapping (so does Merlin). You snap a photo, upload it, and the app uses AI to suggest species matches. Then, real human experts and fellow users chime in to confirm or correct.
When I’m in the Neotropics or the Arctic, places teeming with life I may not be familiar with, iNaturalist is often my first stop. I might use Merlin to confirm the ID of a strange flycatcher, but I use iNaturalist to record everything else I encounter, from bromeliads to bats.
And for photographers working interested in conservation, there’s something deeply gratifying about contributing to real-time global biodiversity data while you work.
We’ve entered a golden age of tools. Between Merlin and iNaturalist, we now carry in our pockets what would’ve once required a library, a Rolodex of biologists, researchers, and so-called experts, as well as years of field experience.
But here’s the thing: these tools don’t replace time spent in the field, time researching, scouting, and educating ourselves. They augment it. They push us to look closer, think deeper, and sharpen our awareness. They help us become better storytellers.
Sometimes birds aren’t quite where they’re supposed to be.
Yesterday I found myself locked in four-wheel drive on a white sand beach off North Carolina. Sitting on the foreshore at the edge of the ocean was a duck like bird with a large yellow beak. It was obviously out of place, but I couldn’t quite make out which species of bird it was - though it appeared to be a scoter of some sort.
Pulling out my 800mm lens, I grabbed a quick photo out the window of my truck. From there, I used my iPhone to take a photo of my photo and ran it through Merlin.
Instantly it identified the bird as a black scoter (Melanitta americana).
A couple miles later, there was another one.
Technically, these birds shouldn’t be here right now. Black scoters nest on subarctic ponds. Any bird this far south at this time of the year is either very late for the party or is a juvenile. But even then, juveniles tend to spend the summer months on the Gulf of Maine, sometimes wandering further south to Nantucket Sound. So, to find not just one but two birds on the beach, especially at these latitudes, spoke volumes. Something was amiss.
Black scoters are sea ducks. While they may breed inland along those subarctic ponds, you don’t find these birds standing around on a beach. And you especially don’t find them standing around on a beach in June in North Carolina. Something was happening offshore. Something that was not being felt on land. At least not yet.
Last night, I fell asleep on the beach in the back of my truck. A full moon was overhead and the hypnotic rhythm of waves meeting sand and moonlight dancing over water lulled me to sleep right there on my tailgate. But when I woke around midnight, something had changed. The air was heavier. The wind was had shifted, moving from southwest to southeast; an uncommon event that drove the islands horses out onto the beach as it provided relief from the mosquitoes behind the dunes. I could make out their dark forms around me some hundred yards away to the north and south. But a counterclockwise wind shift like this also proceeds unsettled weather.
Clouds had moved in, enveloping the moon that no longer shone on the water. I debated curling up and falling back to sleep on this remote and empty beach. But reason overcame coastal hypnosis and my dog and I climbed back into the cab to head up the little sand trail over the dunes and back to the house.
Sometime around 3am I woke again. This time it was to the sound of winds howling around the cottage. Cedar shakes rattled on the sides of the house, and my dog was sitting upright like a statue. The storm had arrived. Even now, 35kt winds continue to shake the house on its stilts as I write this. And the black scoters foretold it all.
There’s no substitute for time in the field. Watching. Waiting. Learning how wind shapes behavior, how tides stir up the shoreline, how light bends. These are the slow skills that every naturalist and wildlife photographer cultivates over years.
But we’re not out here alone anymore. Today, we carry with us a suite of tools that amplify our ability to see and experience. Merlin helps us name what we’ve photographed. iNaturalist helps us understand how that organism fits into its ecosystem. There’s even an app for planning where and when the sun will break the horizon called The Photographer’s Ephemeris.
This isn’t about replacing instinct and knowledge with the trappings of technology. It’s about using smart tools to augment and deepen the work. These apps don’t just give us answers. They teach us to ask better questions.
Because at its heart, wildlife photography is about attention. The better we pay attention, the more we see. And the more we see, the better we tell the story of the living world - one image, and one correctly identified bird, at a time.