BirdsEye: iPhone App for Bird Watching/eBird Users

BirdsEye is the first mobile eBird application that helps you easily find birds and locate directions to nearby birding hotspots. BirdsEye is scheduled for release from the iTunes store on December 2, 2009.

Have you ever opened a field guide and squinted at a small range map, wishing you could bionically zoom in on one of those tiny dots until it reveals the nearest intersection where the bird can be found?

BirdsEye, a new mobile application for bird watching, brings this fantasy a bit closer. Produced in cooperation with the folks at eBird (Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Audubon), BirdsEye blends eBird’s powerful database of bird sightings with iPhone’s GPS so that you can easily locate target birds and find directions to nearby birding hotspots. 

I first introduced this application in my birding with the iPhone article in Birder’s World. Because I worked at Cornell during the nascent stages of eBird and am a huge believer in it, I was excited to beta-test this product and tell readers about it.

When you open BirdsEye, a choice of options is displayed on the home screen (which I’m proud to state the developer added at my suggestion): Find Nearby Birds, Locate A Bird, View Birding Hotspots, Select Birding Location, Update Life List, Visit BirdsEye Store (to purchase new species accounts) and the usual “About” link.

If you press Find Nearby Birds, the app returns a checklist of all the birds ever reported to eBird near your location. In my area, that’s 313 species. The data are remotely transmitted from the eBird database, so you should always be in sync with the eBird mothership as long as you have a solid 3G, WiFi, or EDGE connection.

To help me scout for RECENT bird sightings, BirdsEye segments its “nearby” list into birds that were seen “recently,” or within the last thirty days.

At the time of this writing, my screen shows that an American Avocet was observed “2 days ago.” Good start — this corresponds to what I read on my local birding listserv.

I want to add American Avocet to my New York year list, but how do I find this bird? Easy enough, I press on the species name and it displays a Google map of all the nearby sightings. I zoom in on the map and click on the red pin icon labeled Irondequoit Bay – South End. An ‘action’ button on the left leads me to DIRECTIONS and bam! I store the route in my iPhone, jump in my car, and go.

If I already had American Avocet on my year list, I might wonder, how productive is Irondequoit Bay this time of year? When I press on a blue arrow next to the site name, the app shows a checklist of 149 birds that have been observed and reported to eBird here. It also shows a checklist of 41 bird species reported in recent weeks. I scan these birds, paying special attention to the ones that were seen in the last few days: Dunlin, Peregrine Falcon, Brant, American Coot, plus a few lingering sparrows. That Dunlin catches my eye, as does the Peregrine. Maybe I’ll visit. 

If I need a reminder of what an Amercan Avocet looks or sounds like, or if I need tips on how to identify it in its habitat, I press the bird-shaped icon in the lower right of the screen. This displays one or more images of the bird (from the VIREO collection) plus brief identification tips written specially for the application by Kenn Kaufman. It also provides an audio file.

BirdsEye helps you locate birding hotspots. Sometimes I’ve had a few spare hours to watch birds in a new area, but had no idea where to go. With BirdsEye, I can just press ‘Hotspots’ and it delivers a list of known eBird hotspots segmented by distance. I flip it to Map View, which shows little red pins for each site in the region. From here, I click the ‘action’ button for directions, or click the blue arrow for bird reports. Again, I make up my mind and go! This list of hotspots will continually expand as the popularity of eBird grows.

Another key feature of BirdsEye is its North American Life List, where you can check off each bird species you’ve observed. 

After testing BirdsEye here are my thoughts:

eBird Submissions:  The app does not yet allow users to submit birding checklists to eBird from the field. Obviously, this will generate a huge boost to the eBird database when it can. “It’s a high priority,” says Todd Koym, the developer. It’s coming in a future release.

Stability: So far BirdsEye has been a relatively quick and stable product. The time it takes to fetch recent eBird data is reasonable and the buttons are adequately responsive to my commands.  

Profiles: The VIREO images are sharp and clear; many of them, especially the warblers, just POP. I have no comments on the audio as I haven’t explored the birdsongs yet.

The ID tips are well-written and helpful in describing how to find the birds in each season. For some reason, however, I yearn for them to be talking directly to me, in first person, as if I was holding a little mini-Kenn in my pocket and he was pointing into the spruce bog, telling me to look for the bobbing tail on that Palm Warbler. Is that too much to ask? Maybe so… Perhaps that fantasy will come to life in the next generation of hand-held birding devices. Or maybe someday a holographic bird guide will jump out of my device and bird next to me! 

It’s a good time to note that BirdsEye isn’t, and doesn’t pretend to be, a mobile field guide. As Koym, who is a programmer and birder, says, “I just want you to be able to find and see more birds.” The eBird databse is the engine that helps you find birds. Bird images and ID tips are just an aid.

Navigation: The checklists are navigable and while this is only a mild grievance, I note that my brain is faster than my ability to find a specific target bird. I’m not sure the product is to blame, it may be an industry-wide technological limitation. Or a function of how spoiled we are in the computer age. 

Location Memory: Currently, when you open BirdsEye it remembers the last location you calibrated from.  This is good if you don’t travel frequently. But if you’re in a new location, you need to leave the Find Nearby Birds screen to re-calibrate your current location from Select Birding Location. That’s a bit clunky, and I bet the developers will fix that in a future update.

In short, this is a powerful new application that should help both beginning and advanced bird watchers be “in the know” about bird locations. BirdsEye helps you find birds, but it also helps narrow the possibilities of birds at a given site. This latter benefit can help you focus your ID skills or verify the likelihood of a particular sighting (after using proper identification techniques, of course).

Bird listers and chasers, whether or not they use eBird, can use BirdsEye to keep tabs on local bird sightings and to find target birds near or far. 

I used iBird extensively in the field this last spring and see BirdsEye as a good addition to my arsenal of digital birding tools. If iBird is the what of birding, then BirdsEye is the where.

BirdsEye is the first mobile eBird application

BirdsEye retails for $20 at the iTunes store and includes more than 450 species accounts. For an additional $20, you can purchase an additional 370 species accounts, or purchase them in small groups for $2 each. 

Best iPhone apps at AppStoreHQ

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