Samantha Giraldo, 21, was at her family’s home in Colombia last Christmas when an email from a birding enthusiast in India, half a world away, arrived.
Merlin and eBird, the world’s most widely used birding apps, had highlighted the Giraldo family’s small hotel — named after the guácharo, or oilbird, often found on the property — as a birding hot spot. He was preparing, he wrote, to make the long journey to see it.
That was when Ms. Giraldo felt something fundamental had shifted.
“So many people tell us that’s how they found us,” she said, referring to the apps. “Not just avid birders but backpackers, retirees, people who are new to this passion.”
Colombia, home to the world’s largest number of bird species known to ornithologists, has long struggled to attract as many “avian tourists” as smaller but more politically stable countries, like Costa Rica.
Merlin and its sister app, eBird, both free and run by Cornell University’s ornithology lab, have initiated millions of people as amateur birders, building a bridge between the screen and the natural world.
The Giraldos have recently welcomed visitors from many countries, with the most coming from China. “For us, it’s crazy, it’s life-changing,” Ms. Giraldo said.
EBird, where users log their bird finds, has become the world’s largest online database for bird observations. Merlin allows users to record bird calls and tells them, with high but not perfect accuracy, what type of bird they are hearing.
The apps work in tandem. On eBird, users can upload recordings of bird songs and calls. Once a single species has 150 recordings and each recording is annotated by Cornell experts, the sound data is put into Merlin, which can identify roughly 2,300 species.
Since Merlin was rolled out in 2014, it has rapidly gained users. Nearly 40 million people have installed it on their phones, and in 2025, 16.3 million were considered active users, up 35 percent from a year before. The numbers have accelerated since the pandemic. EBird has also seen a jump in users.
Each year, on a Saturday in May, the Cornell lab challenges users to find as many birds as possible and submit lists of those they identify and attach recordings. Some of that data is used for scientific purposes. But the day has also become an international competition to spot the most species.
Colombia wins every year. Though only the 25th-largest country in the world by land mass, it contains immense ecological diversity, from the Amazon rainforest to glacier-topped Andean peaks to palm-fringed Caribbean beaches.
This year, eight of the top 10 countries were in Central or South America. Many more people participated in the United States than in those eight countries combined, but only 743 species were found there — putting the United States at 11th. Colombia, where 4,000 birders took part, logged 1,566 species.
On eBird’s hot spot map, much of the country is colored red, denoting the highest numbers of species reported.
Colombia’s prominence on the app has contributed to a surge in visitors long desired by the country’s small but passionate birding community.
Many birders there are hopeful about the rise in “avitourism,” not just because it would generate needed income, but also because of the well-established link between ecotourism and species preservation: If people pay to see birds, then it may become more profitable to protect, rather than destroy, habitats.
Ana María Castaño, president of the ornithological society in Antioquia, where the Giraldos’ lodge is, said the local tourist infrastructure had little time to catch up with the recent influx.
Many Colombians turning to the birding business are hoping the new visitors will endure journeys over rutted roads and make do with rudimentary lodging.
In the mountains about four hours north of Medellín, Luz Dary Echavarría Morales, 53, and her husband are part of that new crop of hosts. The couple spent more than a decade clearing the slopes of trees. With chain saws, they would cut acres of trees a day, turning them into 50 sacks of charcoal a month that they would sell in the nearest town. Slowly, they put milk cows onto the cleared land.
“It’s almost like we didn’t realize there were birds here,” Ms. Echavarría said. “Now I know that many of those trees had nests in them.”
She has no formal education in ornithology and does not speak any language other than Spanish, but she hopes that both Merlin, with its pictures of birds and their scientific names, and Google Translate can bridge the divide.
“The birds are giving me a quality of life I could never have imagined,” she said. “I never realized how many people cared about birds.”
With a couple of years now under her belt as an amateur birder and more time to study, since she’s not spending her days cutting down trees, Ms. Echavarría can expatiate on the minor differences between species.
The couple said they were getting two visits per week at their humble property, where people look for a particularly elusive bird, the golden-headed quetzal. The accommodation they offer is a small house of wood and cinder block, glued together with a bit of cement.
There are so many birds on the property that Merlin can barely keep up. On the porch, over a breakfast of coop-fresh eggs, arepas and chocolate milk, I saw a dozen species in a few minutes. A low and enveloping cloud rolled in, and I simply breathed it in. Farther down the slope are rarer finds like the scarlet-rumped cacique and the southern emerald toucanet.
Chris Wood, eBird’s director, has been working with governments across the world as well as other nonprofits to find ways to get more people like Ms. Echavarría on the global birding map — quite literally.
“We have to figure out ways to keep ecosystems intact, in our case because birds migrate and rely on multiples of them, often across continents,” he said. Wood thrushes, Baltimore orioles and Kentucky warblers, for instance, winter in Central America, where many areas have high rates of deforestation, propelled by large corporations and small family businesses like Ms. Echavarría’s.
“These places have really amazing birds, but there has been little way to connect a campesino in, say, Guatemala with an amateur birder in New York,” he said.
Still, not everyone is a fan of Merlin. Some traditional birders recoil at the app’s gamification of birding, a bit like collecting Pokémon cards, which they say negates the simple appreciation of nature and observing a bird for its own sake.
Merlin also relies on an imperfect system to identify birds. It tells you what bird you are most likely hearing. But confirming the identity of a species requires sound, visual observation and understanding the often subtle differences between species.
“If your only knowledge is what Merlin tells you, and Merlin is wrong, you end up deepening the problem of misidentification,” said Luis Germán Olarte, one of Colombia’s most renowned birders. “The app, in other words, doesn’t make you a birder.”
Ms. Echavarría is burnishing her credentials day by day. While her husband can beckon each of their 13 milk cows by name, she makes ever more convincing bird calls.
She finds herself preoccupied outdoors in the same way many other amateur birders do. “Every odd sound I hear,” she said, “I feel like I need to record it on Merlin and find out what it is.”
On a recent day, she stood whistling the call of a golden-headed quetzal, which Merlin describes as a “mournful song, a repeated ‘go home, go home, go home.’”
Within minutes, a juvenile male silently swooped overhead and perched on a tree studded with bromeliads and whose branches were laden with the sagging, woven nests of the russet-backed oropendola.
She gasped, and with none of the hushed restraint typical of the birding elite, she called to the quetzal: “My little fledgling! My love! I’ve missed you!”
Max Bearak is a correspondent for The Times focusing on breaking and international news.
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