Birds eye for iPhone
Iphone’s BirdsEye is one of the simplest, unique and most useful birding application which uses the power of eBird, a collaboration between The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Audubon Society. Bird sights are collected from birdwatchers all over the world. Mostly the data in the BirdsEye app are about the birds found in North America.
BirdsEye which is developed by Birds in the Hand has database of almost 470 most regularly observed birds in North America. If you are ready to invest another $20 you can make an in-app purchase of 377 additional species. You also have choice to buy specific families of birds instead of 377 species database. BirdsEye’s database has field notes from Kenn Kaufman’s Field Guide, from Macaulay Library of Sound they have birds call and photographs taken from Vireo collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences. The electronic Field Guide is not as good as the printed field guides.
This app has a feature where you can compile a list of birds you have seen yourself known as Life List. This feature is most beneficial yet is incomplete as it only creates a list but doesn’t allow you to make personal notes on your sightseeing. The personal sightings will be visible in the BirdsEye if you post your bird sightings to ebird.com but you can’t link the BirdsEye app with your eBird account. You have to do all those manually. Helps in finding whatever bird species you are looking for. They show you a map which shows where and when a particular species was reported and then they also give you directions to the location. But they don’t give the exact location of finding the bird which is a demerit. The app is so intuitive that you can figure out what to do by just looking at the screen once. The layout is quite simple, very well designed and easy to navigate.