eBird

This app is awesome. Recent changes are so helpful. One major change needs to be made to make it 5 stars! Almost everyone accidentally swipes an app away. In this app, even if you open it back up, it refuses to allow you to continue logging your track. Sure, you can continue to log birds but it stops tracking and time-keeping so then one must manually figure it out. What a waste of time, especially at the moment you swipe you realize it and try to get it back when you haven’t even taken another step forward! App should check your location and ask if you mean to continue. Can it really be that hard nowadays? Please, please, for the love of birding and counting, fix this situation! Thank you!!

I got this app when I got Merlin to help me identify and keep track of the birds I see. I love how easily you can switch between Merlin to eBird to log a bird that was identified, and how you can download specific area packs instead of all birds in the country. It’s great to have a checklist like this in my pocket when out in the field! However, I have one bug that I’ve had trouble with, and a suggestion. First off, I can’t use the explore tab to look at local hotspots. When I pick a location, the app crashes every time. That’s a bummer, especially when I wanted to scout a location to see what was in the area. As for my suggestion, it would be nice to have more options when making a checklist. For example, if there were counters for male, female, and juvenile, I feel like that might make for more precise and organized data. Perhaps an ambiguous or unknown option as well for species that look identical regardless of sex. After bug fixes and further improvements in the future, I feel like this would be an even more useful tool.

This app is overall incredible. But some things don’t make any sense: why not let you search for a species within a particular radius from yourself etc. Biggest peeve is with the keyboard. When you want to manually enter a number of birds, so tap on the species and it opens into the full screen counter for that species, the keyboard that opens is alphabetical, not numerical, requiring yet another tap to get it entered. Also, it would be cool if the app would allow you to sort in the birds you already found to the top of the lists (it’s often the case that after seeing one group of Canada geese, I see another), but keep the yet unseen birds in the species or alphabetical lists below. This would offer faster access. When seeing a lot of birds at a time, one doesn’t want to have to scroll or input letter by letter to bring a species back up to add to. Underside shots of more birds would be really helpful, too. Also, ability to message with other birders by consent would also be cool cuz sometimes you don’t meet in the field but wish you could find out more. Many thanks! One more thing: you should make track location OFF as there default. Women and ppl of color are often afraid to post exactly where they regularly go or their homes, so also making it possible to offer the tracking details to you at Cornell but obscure them from the public by default would also be great.