BirdsEye
By Birds In The Hand, LLC
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Description
"Best invention for birding since binoculars"... Kenn Kaufman, Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America
"A landmark in birding"… John Fitzpatrick, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology
★ ★ See more birds with BirdsEye ★ ★
You won't want to leave home without BirdsEye – it's like carrying thousands of local birding experts around in your pocket!
Binoculars and field guides have long been the birder's primary tools. Binoculars help you get a better look at the bird. A field guide helps you identify it. But how do you know *where* to see those birds? Are you at the right place to see the birds you want to see? Could you be missing something interesting nearby? BirdsEye is the indispensable new tool that gives you the inside scoop about which birds are being seen and where.
Experienced birders see more birds not just because they're good at identifying them. They see more birds because they get to the right place at the right time! They know where to go because they're experienced.
BirdsEye guides *you* to your best birding opportunities by unleashing the collective wisdom of the thousands of local birding experts that contribute to eBird - the massive, real-time bird observation system run by the bird experts at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
✔ Find birds nearby
Discover which birds are actually being seen nearby. Get instant access to the local bird life – whether you are at home or on the road.
✔ Discover rare birds and unexpected sightings
Instantly see recent reports of truly rare birds throughout North America, as well as notable reports that are unexpected and significant locally.
✔ Find the birds you really want to see!
Looking for a special bird? BirdsEye can show you where any one of 847 North American species has been seen recently – and even give you directions.
✔ Find great birding places
Browse the map of 25,000 birding hotspots, and see which birds have been observed at each. You will always know where your best birding opportunities are.
✔ Powered by eBird
eBird at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology pulls in more than a million bird observations each month, contributed by thousands of birders and reviewed by local birding experts. Cornell's scientists use these to track bird distribution. BirdsEye uses them to help you see more birds.
✔ Beautiful Extras
For the 847 most observed North American birds, BirdsEye includes:
● Stunning photographs from the VIREO collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences.
● Over six hours of brilliant bird calls and song from the Macaulay Library of Sound.
● Personal insights from field guide author Kenn Kaufman on finding each bird.
✔ Works in the field
New observations are downloaded from eBird over the network and saved for offline use.
✔ Supports iPhone and iPod Touch.
✔ Works in North America north of Mexico.
What's New In Version 1.2
✔ New “Notable Sightings and Rare Birds” feature
Instantly see recent reports of truly rare birds throughout North America, as well as reports that are unexpected and significant locally.
✔ Now includes content for all 847 species!
Customer Reviews
More that a bit disappointing
Well, after 19.99 I would expect to NOT have to pay another $19.99 to get the "rest of the files" - really guys?! Plus, why do i have to wait til I get home to post my findings or wait until someone else gets home, to a computer and has the chance to upload their data to e-bird. Then once I do, my postings don't show up?! The purpose of all this new fangled technology is to release us from the bondage of a computer. If people are out birding and something cool comes up - other people birding would like to know then - not later - after all these birds do fly. Lot to do to make it really workable.
I'll give credit for 2 things: it is helpful for is getting to some hot spots that you may not have been to and for those files they give you, there can be good quality recordings and more than 1 style of call per bird.
Amazing bird finding app
This is a stunning app that makes excellent use of the iPhone's location services and mapping. The app will show you the birds that are close to your location or show you the birds that have been sighted at hot spots. The text, by Kenn Kaufman, provides useful information on the habitats of individual species. The app also incorporates bird songs from the Cornell Ornithological Lab and images from Vireo. There are other fine birding aplications in the app store to aid in identifcation, but this app is unique in helping you find the birds to be identifed.
Great for traveling birders, promising technology
I've been using BirdsEye 1.0 on my iPhone for about a month, through four Christmas Bird Counts and other birding excursions. I've used it at home and in the field across multiple states. A few days ago I upgraded to version 1.1, which is a worthwhile update that addresses one key limitation of 1.0. Overall my opinion of the product is favorable: it delivers quite a bit, and the promise of the technology and where it could go is quite exciting.
BirdsEye, to my mind, provides three main capabilities: an interface to the eBird database that is optimized for the iPhone, the ability to filter sightings data against a life list and timeframes, and, third, supporting species text, photo and vocalization records. The first of these capabilities is by far the most significant and is certainly the reason one would buy this product. So this review will focus on this eBird integration.
If you are not familiar with eBird, you need to go to ebird.org and investigate. The short story is that it is Web-accessible database that the Cornell University (go Big Red!) Laboratory of Ornithology developed to give amateur birders a way to submit their observations to a common repository, one that can support casual and scientific usage. eBird now has years of data covering both the US and selected international locations. Those of us with iPhones can access eBird and submit our checklists of observations using the Safari Web browser; it's awkward but doable. But the other chief use of eBird, searching for occurrences of specific species or of recent observations in a particular area, is quite a chore sometimes even on a PC, much less on the little screen of an iPhone.
This latter task BirdsEye pretty much has nailed. As a pre-BirdsEye example, I traveled to Cincinnati last fall and had 3 species of warbler that I was hoping to see while there. I hunted around in eBird to try and find parks that they had been seen at, spending a fair amount of time on this exploration process. In BirdsEye, the basics of the task take seconds: I would select Cincinnati as a location, go to the species list for that area, select the particular species I was interested in and, bang, there is a map of the area with pushpins at all the recent locations that that species has been seen at. Cool huh? And selecting one of those pushpins tells you where that spot is and lets you go to additional details like a list of the bird species seen there.
There are of course many limitations. The BirdsEye listings show two timeframes, everything in the last 3 years and everything in the last 30 days. The pushpin maps however only show the last 30 days of observations. And more sophisticated analyses that you can do in eBird, like date ranges for migrants, are not currently possible in BirdsEye. So for my Cincinnati warbler example, I would still probably have needed eBird to figure out "if" I could see the species, though BirdsEye could quickly tell me "where". For that particular case, I was there in early September which was too early as my target species were usually seen as migrants in October and November, which BirdsEye would not tell me (though it provides month and year of the most recent observation, which is at least a hint).
But what if I had not had time to plan and research that trip, instead suddenly finding myself in Cincinnati with 2 hours free to go birding? Here the features of BirdsEye match perfectly. You can call up a list of recently seen birds near your current location, find where they have been seen and how recently, and even get the route to that location, all leveraging the iPhone's capabilities. There is also a "life list" capability in BirdsEye that can help you quickly look for species you have not seen before. When you view lists of species in an area or at a particular location, you can filter to just show the recent ones that are not on your life list.
I was initially disappointed with the life list functionality. It really is insufficient to be a primary life list, since it captures no information about where or when you saw the species. But if you take it as a given that you need to keep your real life list in some other tool (like eBird), then the BirdsEye list is really just the "birds I don't need to see again" list. So I'm always happy to see a Common Raven or a Peregrine Falcon or a Winter Wren, but I don't need to go out of my way for a Ring-billed Gull or an American Robin. If the latter species are on your life list in BirdsEye, then you can filter a species list to show what *other* species are around. So less than a life list, but still useful.
The last major capability to consider is the species information in BirdsEye. Most species have a paragraph of text, two pictures and recordings of the major vocalizations. The text is "field guide lite". Very well written, but just a quick smattering of useful facts. The pictures are excellent, better than those in some more expensive photographic field guides I own. And the sound recordings are good, with a nice interface that lets you select the particular vocalization you want to hear. I should note that the base BirdsEye product only comes with this data for about 350 species and additional purchases are necessary to get all 800+ US species.
My impression is that BirdsEye would be a particularly good product for someone who travels a lot in the US and likes to go birding on short notice. It would also be a fun tool for someone starting out who wanted to quickly build a count of life species seen. And I think there are specific ways that features like the "life list" could be manipulated to help with difficult activities like planning a "big day". But for the birder who doesn't travel much and is widely experienced with the local birds and birding spots, BirdsEye may be overkill and less useful than the local email birding-list. Though there is no reason why you can't have both on your iPhone.
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$19.99
- Category: Reference
- Updated:Feb 26, 2010
- Current Version:1.2
- 1.2
- 270 MB
- Language:English
- Seller:Birds in the Hand, LLC
- © Birds in the Hand, LLC
Requirements:Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.
