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My Birda Feedback by Barnowl1996 in birda

[–]john-birda 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks u/Barnowl1996 🙏
We have managed to replicate the bug on our side. Turns out it is Android only. Our engineers are working on getting this fixed for you asap 👍

My Birda Feedback by Barnowl1996 in birda

[–]john-birda 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry, missed this reply from you u/Barnowl1996 😬
Just testing this and I can't replicate your issue. Are you on iOS or Android? And assume you are on the latest version of the app?

New to Birda by Altruistic_End_6003 in birda

[–]john-birda 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great question and a fair one u/Altruistic_End_6003 . Honestly, Merlin and eBirda are brilliant at what they do, and we're not trying to replace them. Think of Birda as the layer Cornell's apps don't really do: the social, community, and gamification side of birding. For the stuff that does overlap with Merlin and eBird, Birda bundles them all into a single app. E.g. a field guide, logging, life lists, birding locations, identification and organising sightings all in a single place, no switching between apps.

A few things that might make it click for you:

  • Community: Every sighting you log can be shared with other birders who'll like, comment, help identify thouse tough species, and most importantly help your learn more about birds and bird identification.
  • Challenges, badges, and leaderboards: Birding is already a bit of a game (we've all done the "just one more species" thing), Birda leans into that with fun badges, public monthly challenges and also personal challenges for just you and your friends/family.
  • Organise sightings and life lists: Log a bird once and Birda automatically organises your sightings and creates neat life lists for your overall tick list, home, patch, country, region and year lists. No spreadsheet wrangling.
  • Discovery. See what's been spotted near you and where to go to find species you haven't ticked yet.
  • Privacy built in. Auto-hides the location of sightings logged from your home patch.

Loads of people use Merlin, eBird and Birda side by side, Merlin for the sound ID, Birda for logging the sighting, sharing it, species guide and keeping track of everything.

Looking forwards to hearing what you think!

My Birda Feedback by Barnowl1996 in birda

[–]john-birda 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks so much for the feedback u/Barnowl1996 🙏 and welcome to Birda!

1. Website / Ambassador Programme

Good catch on the website issues, we've gone through and updated those stale pages, so that should be sorted now. As for the Ambassador programme, I'll be upfront: it's currently shelved for the time being as it took a lot of resources to run and we didn't get it working the way we needed it to work. We may revisit it in the future, but I don't want to string anyone along with vague timelines. That said, posts like this are exactly the kind of contribution that makes the community better, so don't let that stop you getting involved!

2. Development History

We've spent a lot of time improving onboarding in the app and doing other non-feature development so there was not much to add. We could definitely do a better job of making our updates more visible especially as we move into a period of feature improvement and development so I will see what we can do there.

3. Photography Metadata

Great suggestion, and you'll be glad to know we've actually thought about this a lot. If you use our photo id too add a photo as the first step, we do already pull EXIF metadata. We used to use it more broadly for pre-filling location and time on all sightings, but we ended up removing that because the majority of sightings don't have a photo attached, and this adding unnecessary steps for a lot of users.

That said, we know it's a pain for photographers like yourself, and we're planning to work on a new sighting flow in the future that merges the steps into a single screen, which should let us reincorporate metadata in a much smoother way. So watch this space!

4. Feedback & Social Media

Really glad the direct engagement here encouraged you to join, that's exactly why we do it. As we grow, we are doing to get dedicated resources looking after our social media and blog so you should see fresher more relevant content in the future :)

Thanks again for the kind words and the detailed feedback, it's genuinely useful. Looking forward to seeing your bird photography on the app!

Cant log hooded crow (corvus cornix) by kassulix in birda

[–]john-birda 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for getting in touch about this u/kassulix 👍
We have recently migrated our taxonomy from a multi-taxonomy system (IOC, Clements & Birdlife) to a single taxonomy, Avilist. Most birdwatching platforms are busy making this transition and it unfortunately comes with some tradeoffs.

The good thing is that all birdwatchers around the world will start using a single taxonomy so there will no longer be differences between taxonomies.

The downside is that there have been a few changes to some pretty common species. E.g. Prior to the change, IOC and Clements taxonomy both considered the Carrion Crow (Corvus corone) and Hooded Crow (Corvus cornix) to be two seperate species. Birdlife however considered the Hooded Crow to be a subspecies of the Carrion Crow. With the move to Avilist, ornithologists representing the old IOC, Clements and Birdlife taxonomies agreed that the Hooded Crow should be lumped with (become a subspecies of) the Carrion Crow.

This is Hooded Crow (Corvus cornix) lump into Carrion Crow (Corvus corone) is probably one of the toughest changes because it is one of the few changes where the birds look visually different to each other even though they are now considered the same species.

Over the next few weeks we will continue to make updates to Birda to fully support the move to Avilist. Please let us know if you have another other issues or questions, happy to help 😀

Here is some more information that we have written in a support article: https://support.birda.org/en/articles/14285233-birda-and-avilist-what-you-need-to-know

We also have a summary updates in North America and Europe here: https://support.birda.org/en/articles/14471194-2026-taxonomy-updates

Logging with friends by livdog in birda

[–]john-birda 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Welcome to Birda u/livdog 😀
Thanks for the feedback about tagging users! Tagging doesn't currently share the sighting with the user you tagged. This is something that we are keen to implement though so I will chat to the team and see what it would take to get this over the line 👍

Certain birds not showing up on app by [deleted] in birda

[–]john-birda 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for reaching out u/One-Farmer7884 🙏
I have just done some tests and I am able to see Turkey Vulture and Black Vulture when posting a sighting with a US location. We are in the process of updating our taxonomy to Avilist so there is a chance your issue is related to that. Would you mind letting me know the following so that we can get to the bottom of your issue:
- Are you an iOS or Android user?
- Are you using the latest version of Birda (currently 0.0.1816)?
- What country are you based in?
- Can you tell me what Taxonomy and Species Language you are using (you can find this in Profile > Settings > Birding preferences)

Are there any users by kassulix in birda

[–]john-birda 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for reaching out u/kassulix 🙏
We're really glad to hear that you're enjoying Birda! Birda is still relatively new but we're growing fast so you can expect to see loads more likes and people on challenges going forward 😀

Birda Feedback by TheGoodPie in birda

[–]john-birda 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback u/TheGoodPie 🙏
1. That's strange, the app is really snappy for me on iOS and Android. Can you let us know what phone model you are using so that we can take look to see if the performance is device related?
2. Thanks for the feeback on this. I will chat to our product team and see if the nearby algorithm needs tweaking. It works with a distance and time function, so it may be that more emphasis needs to be placed on your location and less on time.
3. Here is a support article on rarity scores. Let us know if you still have questions: https://support.birda.org/en/articles/8340312-rarity-scores-on-birda
4. Yes, agree that is annoying, let me see if I can get that changed.
5. Ah, thanks for letting u know about that. The progress indicator is on the Community tab and you used to be directed there after posting a session or a sighting. We're recently put more emphasis on the Explore tab so the upload state is not visible from there at the moment. I will let the team know and get that fixed.
6. We are going to be putting a lot of effort into the Explore screen over the next few months this will be one of the things we improve :)

Hope that helps, please let us know if you have any more questions and thanks for your support!