Project FeederWatch

Disappointed in the update- it took YEARS for Cornell to update this app, unlike eBird or Merlin, which are updated now and then. And now it logs me out when I close the app, and when I log back in I have to swipe through the whole ‘welcome and here’s how to participate’ pages again- every single time. the larger layout is annoying, it just means less information fits on my screen. The extra reporting options are nice but overall they’ve made the app more annoying to use.

The last month or so I have been forced to close the app on numerous occasions and reload it in order to continue a count. I have been using this app for several seasons and generally it is an improvement over using paper forms and manually uploading data. But having to reload is getting old. Fortunately there has been no loss of data. One general issue from the beginning is there is no way to enter data offline. So if you are sitting in your yard out of range of your router, you must either keep a paper count or try to remember your sighting until you can get back online. E-Bird does not have this limitation but those counts cannot be used for FeederWatch. Looking forward to an update that will fix these issues.

This app is so frustrating I may quit Feeder Watch altogether, which is sad because I love birds. I’ve used this app for several hours and discovered it will not let me fix an incorrect bird ID. I can add sightings but not delete any of them after I hit one wrong button. It just won’t zero out that bird. It’s so discouraging that the app failed to work within minutes of me downloading it. So I’m going back to using the website on my phone, which also has drawbacks. Cornell’s computer engineering team was obviously not consulted by its ornithology department…or those schools are just very bad at what they are studying.