Birda - Bird Watching, Birding

Having used different birding apps for years daily, Birda has easily become my favorite! Birda has found a way to take key features from other birding apps, list keeping, a top tier bird guide, challenges, and plenty of educational features. The challenges are fun and unique to Birda! Which really does inspire you to get out and look for birds! You get “Badges” for completing challenges which is fun. You can also set your own challenges for you to complete! Seeing posts from people all over the world has been very educational. The list keeping in this app is great! There are photos of the birds next to the name which is great for beginners but also great for experienced birders. Just a click from there and you are brought to a wealth of info on the bird, including the calls! And all within the app! Not only can you see your bird lists but see the amount of time you spent. The biggest appeal to me has been the social features that make it fun to really “bird nerd out” with other birders and bird watchers... I can only do that so much on other social apps. Here it’s a part of it.

I dont know what to say. The community is great, the features are great, no massive popup ads… I can’t get enough of it. It seems like even though there’s a diverse audience on Birda, everyone seems to get along great and have a lot of fun. You don’t have to tell everyone about who you are, or get into political matters or do anything stressful on Birda. It’s just an app where you can have fun outdoors and chat with a bunch of nice people that you don’t know but you sort of get to know in a way over time through the way they show themselves on the community. Overall, 10/10 app would recommend to birders of any skill level (being an extremely inexperienced birder myself 😅). Thanks for the great experience, Birda!

I can see the potential for this app, especially for new birders. The ‘gamification’ and badges etc might make for fun challenges for new and old birders. As someone who has been listing daily on eBird for years I am a lot more in tune with that app and record keeping style. Trying to use eBird with Merlin and then simultaneously keeping up with another similar app in the field is just too much and I personally find it too time consuming and distracting. I’ve given it a few weeks and realized it’s just one more thing I’m staring at on my phone when I should be concentrating on the birds and instead I’m staring at my phone trying to simultaneously keep two accurate lists with different types of data entry. I may try adding eBird data manually at the end of the week for a bit but eBird has the top billing for accurately maintaining my personal records in an easy to digest format. It’s a fun addition to the birding space and folks who aren’t big listers or eBird users will surely find it fun and valuable but it’s more of a novelty in my opinion. I do appreciate the effort to introduce another app to liven up birding.