If you’ve been here for a while you know that retirement has turned me into a complete nature nerd. Instead of having my head down and my eyes on a screen all day while working, I now go outside all the time to investigate new bird songs, learn new plant names, and watch local fauna. I also often plan my nights around watching amazing astrological events. All that to say, I’m a very different person 🙂 .
However, I would have a much harder time with these new hobbies if I didn’t have access to the awesome free apps I’m going to mention today. Instead of bringing approximately one million books showing the local wildlife in all of the places I live around the country and the world in a given year, I have that power in my cell phone. It’s like magic 🙂 . So here are my favorite apps for investigating our natural world. I hope they can help you in case you’re interested in this kind of exploration as well.
Astronomy
Star Walk 2
This app shows an overlay of your night sky. You open the app, point your phone up and you can see what the planets and stars you’re viewing are called as well as some general information about them.
The app also has an awesome dark night mode so the light from your phone’s screen doesn’t mess with your vision while it’s adjusting for stargazing (this takes about 30 minutes in the dark by the way 😉 ).
The app also alerts me when something new is happening in the sky, which helps me not have a million calendar reminders to the frequent amazing things happening in our night sky. Instead, I know Star Walk will let me know what’s up.
Nature
Google Lens
I’ve used a lot of apps at this point to see which I like best for different kinds of identification and so far, Google Lens is the best all around star for photograph identification. Be it an animal or plant, I can either open Google Lens and snap a picture or just upload a pic from my phone’s photos and it will tell me in seconds what I’m looking at.
On my Android I’m always just milliseconds away from identifying a new plant – birds are more of a challenge for me. “Stop moving so fast bird and say cheese!” However, I have found other ways to more easily identify birds, which I’ll talk about in the next section.
Also heads up, Google Lens can do a lot more than identify natural objects – feel free to look into their other features, such as translation and identifying anything from famous buildings to the type of shirt you’re wearing. It’s a wild world.
iNaturalist
This app lets you take a pic of anything – flora or fauna and it helps to identify it. You can also upload your own photos to have people verify what it is, but despite using this app for over 6 months, I haven’t done that yet. Maybe I should get on it, or maybe as a serious introvert, I should not add more (even online) social interaction to my life. Either way, this app can be helpful but I’ve found Google Lens to be better at identifying my random photos of natural things.
Seek
I was talking about iNaturalist on this blog when I went to Thailand and a Thai reader suggested I check out this app, Seek (an iNaturalist offshoot 😉 ), because it’s better at identifying Asia’s flora and fauna instead of iNaturalist. I did find that to be true, but also discovered something else I love about this app that has made me now use it across all my global travels.
If you input a location, it shows you the most common of all the below things anywhere I am in the world. This helps me know what to look out for plant and animal wise that’s local to the area, and get a general feel for the place strangely 🙂 .
- Plants
- Amphibians
- Fungi
- Fish
- Reptiles
- Arachnids (AH!)
- Birds
- Insects
- Mollusks
- Mammals
Birds
Merlin
Aww yeah we’re back to my new buddies – BIRDS 🙂 ! A lot of the time I can only hear birds and not see them (sneaky buggers!) so I love apps that help identify birdsongs and help me both learn new birdsongs and help me know what I’m looking for visually in a tree as a result.
I’ve tried every app anyone has ever recommended concerning birds, and currently the best I’ve found to identify bird songs is Merlin. I had previously used BirdNET (which I talk about below), but Merlin identified birds while it’s still recording audio, which BirdNET doesn’t do. I find that super helpful to try and parse a new bird sound instead of hoping I captured the correct audio and not knowing until BirdNET is done processing.
I also love Merlin because if you input a location and time of year, it shows you all the birds that appear in that area and how common they are. It’s super helpful if I see a bird, know what family it’s from and want to identify it quickly that way. It also has a way to input bird characteristics to identify a bird I’ve seen that way.
BirdNET
As I mentioned, BirdNET doesn’t tell you what birds it’s heard until after you stop recording and it processes the audio. However, keeping BirdNET on my phone paid off in an unexpected way. It was better at identifying birds in Thailand than Merlin despite me downloading the “Thailand” bird pack for Merlin before leaving. I’m not sure why this is, but I guess they have different data they pull from and so different apps are better at identifying birds in certain regions. Random 🙂 .
Audubon
And finally, we come to Audubon. This was my first bird app and I used it all the time to both identify and log the birds I’ve seen. They have a nice interface to identify birds based on characteristics and used to have an easy way to log the birds you see, but that changed with a recent update. They made the UI unnecessarily complicated so I’ve stopped using it.
Instead of counting on the app, I’ve been keeping my own bird list, which I then share on each of my Monthly Retirement Updates – the latest of which is below:
Conclusion
And those are my favorite nature apps! It’s taken a lot of trial and error to build my app ‘arsenal’, but it’s been more than worth it. I love the ease at which I can learn about the world around me and I hope this helps you as well!
What are your favorite nature apps?
I like this roundup! It’s a category of apps I never use, because I’m always looking at a screen instead of at nature 😅 I don’t use any nature apps, but in the spirit of sharing, the apps I use most (that aren’t purely functional, like checking my calendar or searching information) are I Love Hue and I Love Hue 2. They’re puzzles with pieces made of different colour hues. Good for training your ability to distinguish between different shades of colours. I find them soothing and fun.
I’m so happy it was helpful and that’s SO cool! I didn’t know apps like that excited. They look like fun!
Ventusky is another one I like. It’s a free weather radar app that shows temperature, wind speed and direction at any altitude.
Ooh I checked out Ventusky and it looks really cool! Thank you for sharing.
Love it! Especially the bird-related apps. Birds are the best!
Yay!! I’m so glad you like them.
You had mentioned using Google Lens to identify plants, and it hadn’t even occurred to me to try it until that. Not only has it worked very well, it’s so much more accurate than the other apps I was using for the same purpose! Thanks for the idea.
So happy to help! I was surprised with how much more accurate it was than dedicated apps as well.
(PS: I responded to your email in case you didn’t see it or I ended up in your spam folder!)
Yes! I got it and read it and have the reply on my list of things to do – soon 🙂 . Who knew traveling, eating and reading could take up so much time lol?