Uncover Mother Nature’s magic with these apps!

Have your kids ever told you they’re bored while out camping? (Teenagers, am I right?) We spend so little time in nature that most of us are oblivious to its many wonders. Perhaps we need to change that. Don’t worry—it’ll be easy! I’ve done all of the research for you.

Before your next trip, download some of the following apps. They’ll introduce your kids to the birds, plants, insects, animals, fungi, and night sky! While you’re at it, try a few of them yourself. You might gain an entirely new appreciation for the world around you. Let’s get to the list!

Become a bird-watching wizard with Merlin

As an initiative of Cornell’s Ornithology Lab, Merlin is an iOS and Android birding coach that helps you identify the birds you see—even if you’re a complete novice to bird watching. It works around the world and is available in many languages.

You answer questions about your bird’s date, location, color, size, and behavior. Merlin taps data from 3 million descriptors (and 800 million bird sightings) to help ID your subject. You can also snap a photo or upload a sound to get a real-time list of suggestions. You can even use the app to build your digital bird sighting scrapbook. Merlin uses deep learning as well as data from eBird and Visipedia to help improve the understanding and protection of birds and nature.

Identify mushrooms with Shroomify

Are you a fun guy? Then you’ll dig Shroomify. (Apologies. I can’t resist a bad pun.). To the point, though, Shrooomify is a handy app that’s available for both iOS and Android. Pros and hobbyists alike will benefit from having Simon Grogan’s Shroomify in their back pocket to help identify mushrooms while foraging in the field.

Select the attributes of the fungi you’d like to name. The app will then identify the most likely match. Shroomify notes the edibility of all listed mushrooms. The app lists 400+ common fungi, contains 1,000+ images, and offers graphs with mushroom rankings. It automatically loads a dataset for your region and shows the mushrooms in your region. Check the Top 20 to see common Fungi for the month you’re in.

Join iNaturalist’s citizen scientist movement

Are you nature-curious? You should join the 3.2 million folks who’re a part of iNaturalist’s unique social network. The group’s members include scientists, biologists, and others who help one another learn about nature. The app also assists in generating and sharing research-quality biodiversity data. iNaturalist is a joint initiative of National Geographic and the California Academy of Sciences.

You can use iNaturalist online or on iOS or Android devices, free of charge in over 35 languages. Use visually similar suggestions to identify plants and animals and get feedback (and verification) from the community. Then build a “life list” by noting where, when, and what you saw in each observation. With iNaturalist, you can learn about nature, participate in a community, and contribute to biodiversity research.

Your kids might also enjoy the iNaturalist’s Seek app. It encourages folks to get outside to photograph living things, and earn badges for observing species and participating in challenges. Seek is also available on iOS and Android.

Learn your aphids from your antlions with Picture Insect

Step a little closer and you tend to see a whole heck of a lot more. Picture Insect can help you do just that! It’s an insect identifier tool used by over 3 million people that’s available on both iOS and Android. Just take a photo on your device and the app’s embedded AI will identify the insect in it.

Picture Insect’s huge database of insects contains identifying advice from entomologists. The app’s creators claim that Picture Insect can identify 4,000+ insect species with 95.28% accuracy. The app also offers information about the species in its database (names, images, characteristics). It also lets you track identified species in your collection and share your finds with friends.

Use LeafSnap to outmaneuver plants with painful itches

Most things in the forest look sort of the same to me. I’m not sure that I can tell poison ivy from cannabis leaves—which could probably lead to some discomfort. This is where Leafsnap comes in. Available on both iOS and Android, LeafSnap helps dummies like me to tell the difference between plants you touch and those you don’t.

Its makers claim that it recognizes 90% of all known species of plants, flowers, fruits, and trees, covering most of the planet’s plant species. Its ginormous plant database is continually growing, with new information added regularly. Much like the other apps in this list, LeafSnap lets you keep track of the specimens you identify. Back at home, it’ll help remind you when to water, fertilize, prune, rotate, repot, mist, or harvest your green friends. Neat stuff!

Spread your wings with Leps by FieldGuide

Amateur malacologist André Poremski has been busy creating a set of field guides. His crowd-sourced compendium of natural and cultural things started with a guide dedicated to Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies to us lay-folk). You can download Leps for iOS and Android.

The app works as an identification assistant that uses AI to analyze moth and butterfly images, and suggests possible matches. These are later verified by experts in the Fieldguide community, which includes some “lep lovers” (a term I was entirely unaware of until now). This project represents an effort to catalog all of the 175,000+ species of moths and butterflies around the world. I say this is pretty darned cool.

Go on a celestial journey with SkySafari

Some folks bring a projector and movies on their camping trips. Since 2009, SkySafari has offered amateur astronomers a more compelling show that’s as old as time. You can download SkySafari for iOS or Android.) It contains information on 100,000,000+ stars, 3 million galaxies, and 750,000 solar system objects.

SkySafari offers a bunch of fancy tools to integrate with your telescope. It also lets you share your star chart, offer a planetarium-style tour of the night sky, or see what others are looking at way out there. Wish there were a TV Guide for the stars? SkySafari’s event finder and notifications can point out meteor shows, eclipses, planetary-moon events, and other astronomical events. Look up… way up!

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That’s our list! Some fun apps to try out, right? Heck, I say that if those apps don’t cure your kids of their boredom affliction, there might not be much hope for them. Well, at least until they worm their way past adolescence. 😉

Looking for more fun things to do while out camping? I’ll keep pulling together information and sharing it here. If you don’t stop by all that often you might want to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We’ll be sure to post links to new stories there.

Have fun, and keep on exploring, campers!

Bonus!

Looking for more apps to help plan your camping adventures? Check out our car camping app round-up article for some other great recommendations!

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