Identify American birds by their songs and calls. The automated recognition system includes a library of about 241 distinct bird calls and songs. It is rated 9 over 10 by Bird Watching Magazine for being extremely accurate. This app allows you to keep an accurate diary of birds based on the work done by elite ecologists behind this technology.

Website: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id681091523

What Users Love About the App

“I read some reviews before purchasing that made me skeptical of the abilities that this app would have. However, they were completely off!! This app is a genuine pleasure to use. I mostly enjoy it because it’s convenient and extremely helpful. The quiz function is probably a favorite because I love learning new things by being quizzed! It identifies the birds the birds that I hear very rapidly as well! Learning bird sounds is probably the single most important skill in moving from beginning birding to intermediate birding . This app is worth all the money in the world and I was more than glad to pay just $5.”

“I really enjoy birdwatching and this app is the only app I am aware of that will record and identify bird calls and songs. It is truly incredible. Several birds in my backyard have been elusive with their calls, and this app help me not only identify them but archived the recording for future playback. I also discovered the birds in my backyard love to hear birds of their kind calling, it is so fun to play bird calls back on a loop in the app and watch the birds in my backyard flit around in excitement as they hear the bird calls from the app. 10 out of 10!”

“We moved to a 4 1/2 acre farm. There are several bird families here. With this ap we are able to identify them from their song. That allowed us to look them up in the picture identity. Now when we see them we know who they are and their song.”

“For someone who grew up surrounded by northern song- (and other) birds, I’ve always felt woefully ignorant about their songs. This app has helped me to begin to match up the birdcalls I hear with those I can identify visually, as well as to identify those whose names I only knew. Very pleasing—thank you!”

“I’m a photographer who recently started photographing birds. This app is great and identifies my little friends and then lets me play back their songs and calls. The interface could use a little work but still my favorite app!”

What Users Dislike About the App

“I like this a lot, but find navigation difficult. There are many times when there’s too much other noise to get a clear recording, and the manual look up is cumbersome. Organization by families is not useful for many (probably most) of us. This morning I heard three fledglings with a call that was new to me. My best guess was they were cowbirds. They were gone before I could record. I opened the app- which is organized by bird family and I had no idea what the cowbird family is. No search function on the first page, but an index. So I tried the index, only to find it too is organized by family rather than name- not useful at all!! I started to dig through and finally found the cowbird under Icterid. Too much work!! Only later did I figure out that I had to go through a family to find the Search function. Please either put the search function on the 1st page, or organize the index by name. Re-do this and I’m change my rating to 5 stars. And yes, they were cowbirds. What a curious call!!”

“I got this app because I was trying hard to identify a bird that I keep hearing a unique call sound for but can never see the bird. I find this app rather picky about the quality length and loudness of the recording made. I did not have trouble finding the record button like some have complained about. But I have made sample after sample of the bird song and I keep getting warnings about too short, poor sound quality, not loud enough, and then when I think I got one that matches their picky criteria it comes up with a list of birds that have no resemblance to what I recorded. The UI/UX is clunky and strange at best. Sometimes the play button has no stop button, and sometimes it does. There’s no way to edit the length of the song sample to eliminate other birds that are chiming in. After you have it analyzed the song it gives you a list of bird choices. If you pick one to listen to their recording of it and decide that’s not the one… if you go back, your choices are add it to the library or you can listen to your recording again but you can’t analyze it and get your list back it appears. If you close this window because you’re not ready to add it since you didn’t find the bird, it will toss your recording. lt’s just a wacky app and a waste of five dollars. I wished I could get my five dollars back as it couldn’t even ID one bird call.”

“This App purports to be Bird Song ID, yet that feature is buried after several screen taps under My Recordings. Even when you tap “My Recordings,” nothing is obvious about what to do next. So you fumble around finding Add Recording. Finally you see a tab that says Automatic Recognition. It is simply not Field Friendly. “Automatic Recognition” should be the first thing you see when you open up the app…a big button to hit like Shazam. When you hear a bird you can’t identify, it does not give you the time to 1. Get the phone out, 2. Find the app on your phone, 3. Then wade through screens until you find the hidden buttons to do what you need. By that time, the bird has flown. There are other inexplicable aspects of the App: Bird Families. Here’s what I see on the first screen, stuff like Cardinal (not a bird family), Chickadee (not a bird family), Chachalaca (really? on the first screen? What are my chances of happening across a Chachalaca?) Good idea, but ill-conceived. Developers should make the primary function of this App “Auto Recognition” then put a large button in the middle of the screen that starts that process with a single tap.”

“I bought this to identify my backyard birds from their songs, and for that purpose this app is a complete waste of money; it has yet to accurately identify a single bird song from my recordings. The app complains that the quality of my recordings is poor and it seems unless the bird is singing directly into your phone this will be the case, because even if it’s just the one bird singing fairly loudly and no other background noise, my recording is still not good enough. There is no way to edit your recording to cut out extra birds, and even their own recorded examples will sometimes have extraneous birds chiming in so you don’t know what you’re supposed to be hearing. The manual ID feature is a joke; I’ve gotten wide-ranging suggestions from owl to heron to sparrow for a single entry. I don’t know how they come up with their percentage accuracy but these too are a joke because they are wildly inaccurate. I also know that some birds have multiple calls/songs but the app does not give more than one of each. Don’t waste your money on this one.”

“I had high hopes when I got this app, but I was greatly disappointed when I realized the app was essentially just guessing the most common birds around me. To test this, I played a variety of different bird calls from another phone and had this app try to identify them; sure enough, it just kept suggesting common birds like the cardinal, goldfinch, and robin. I suppose the app is probably right some of the time, given how common those birds are… but it’s purely because of luck. I will say though, at least you can play the bird calls on this app to check if it sounds the same. (Though the answer is usually no.) That’s the only thing saving this review from being 1-Star. I wasted money on this app. If you’re an aspiring birder, it seems there is still no great method to identify bird calls other than just looking up possible candidates the slow way.”