Thicket

Press

Last updated: 1 October 2026

Thicket is a free birdsong app for iPhone and Android, made by the UK wildlife photographer Thomas Fearn. It identifies birds by sound entirely on the phone, with a choice of two identification models, BirdNET or Google DeepMind’s Perch. It is built for birders who already know their common birds: almost everything it does can be set the way they bird.

Fact sheet

• Name: Thicket
• Made by: Thomas Fearn (WildThingsUnhurried), UK
• Platforms: iPhone, iPad and Android
• Release: out now on the App Store (UK first); Android in early access, on Google Play for everyone later in October
• Price: free. No ads, no subscription, no in-app purchases, no tracking
• Identification: on the phone, with no signal needed. BirdNET V2.4 is built in; Perch 2.0 is a free download in Settings
• Sightings nearby: recent reports from eBird and iNaturalist
• Languages: English, Welsh, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Dutch
• Account: optional, only to keep history in step between devices
• Website: thicketbirds.com

What’s different about it

• A choice of model. Most bird apps hear through one model, chosen for them. Thicket offers two, from different teams and trained differently: BirdNET, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics and Chemnitz University of Technology, and Perch 2.0 from Google DeepMind. Birders choose which one listens and can switch at any time.
• You set the rules. How likely a bird must be to count as common where you are, how long before a bird is flagged again, how hard the model reaches for a match, whether confidence shows as a percentage, how near a rarity must be to alert you, whether clips are kept.
• It stays quiet. A bird is flagged the first time it sings, then left alone. Mute or snooze any bird, or mute everything that’s common where you are and listen only for what isn’t.
• Two hours, in colour. Sessions of up to two hours, on a spectrogram you can drag back through, each bird’s calls drawn in its own colour.
• Nothing leaves the phone. Sound is analysed on the device and recordings are never uploaded.
• Heard is not seen. Exports to eBird, BirdTrack, iNaturalist or a spreadsheet only ever include birds the user has checked, so unverified heard-only records don’t end up in anyone’s data.

Honest about the limits

Identification by sound is hard, and Thicket gets things wrong, most often between species that genuinely sound alike. It makes no claim to be more accurate than other apps: it uses the same kinds of model they do. Confidence percentages aren’t yet calibrated against field results.

About Thomas Fearn

Thomas Fearn is an award-winning wildlife photographer based in the UK, working under the name WildThingsUnhurried. His photographs have been shown in exhibitions around the UK, and Kingfisher on a Bulrush was an Official Selection at the International Photography Awards 2026. Thicket grew out of mornings in hides and along woodland edges, where you know a bird’s call long before you see it. See his work at thomasfearn.co.uk and @thomas_fearn.

Thomas Fearn, the wildlife photographer, is not associated with anyone else of the same name.

A basic DBS certificate is available on request.

Images

Free to use in coverage of Thicket. Please credit photographs “Thomas Fearn”.

• App icon (PNG, 512 × 512)
• Banner (PNG, 1024 × 500)
• Screenshots: Listen, a bird, Life List, Recent News (WebP; full-size PNGs on request)
• Kingfisher on a Bulrush by Thomas Fearn

Credits

Identification uses BirdNET V2.4, developed by the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Chemnitz University of Technology, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, and Perch 2.0 by Google DeepMind, licensed Apache 2.0. Nearby sightings come from eBird and iNaturalist.