Central America

Have you tried Merlin Bird ID yet? Merlin is a free bird identification app developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology with photos, sounds and species accounts to help you identify birds. Merlin is available for iOS and Android devices, and offers bird packs for all the birds of the United States and Canada, and a bird pack specifically for the Yucatan Peninsula. At the moment, we’re working on a pack for Costa Rica, the first Central American country to receive its own Merlin pack. Other Central American countries will follow.

A useful component of Merlin is Photo ID, which identifies birds directly from your photos. Just snap a photo of a bird in your yard, or take a photo of the back of your camera, and Merlin will suggest an identification. For Photo ID to work well, we need 500+ photos for each species—and that’s where you can help us!

Photo ID benefits from a wide variety of images including birds in flight, from odd angles, partially hidden by vegetation, and any other pose you might capture a bird in. On this page you will see a list of species for Costa Rica with the number of photos currently in our database. We will update this list regularly. Please take a look at this list, and if you have photos of any of these species, please share them with us via eBird. Many thanks for your help!