This iPhone app is truly for the birds

Peterson’s famous Field Guide to Backyard Birds [App Store link] has come to the iPhone/iPod touch, and in many ways it is a natural fit with the iPhone multimedia features. The field guide, which is a 92 MB download (!), contains hundreds of bird species, as well as the sounds of their calls, and of course illustrations and information about each bird.

I gave the app a try in my Arizona backyard. First, you enter the first two digits of your zip code, then you are provided a list of birds that should be local to your area. The quail that were sitting on my back wall were on the list, as well as the pesky road runner that peeks in the window every so often. I also learned that the roadrunner is part of the cuckoo family. Who knew?

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The app is $2.99US. Birders will also want to take a look at iBird Explorer Plus [App Store link]. It is pricey at $19.99US but it has a far more expansive catalog of birds, and does allow for searches.

via This iPhone app is truly for the birds – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

I’ve been experimenting with both of these for a few days. Not mentioned here is that the iBird guides have regional versions taht are cheaper than the $20 everything. Neither one is going to make me leave my Sibley’s field guide at home, to be honest, and neither one will convince me to retire Birdjam, which I use for song identification and for playing song tapes in the field.

The Peterson guide is okay, but I much prefer the iBird; the illustrations are better for field identification, and it includes a picture of the bird as well as the drawings, although the quality of many of the pictures doesn’t impress me. They’re okay, nothing more. The iBird range charts are much superior, they include better descriptive text, and they cross-index to similar species, all nice touches. It makes it useful for a field guide, even if I’m not ready to say it replaces the need to carry a printed one. I’ll have to work with it more before I’m willing to do that.

Some of the Peterson features have issues. I found the quizzes to be almost insultingly simple — useless for anyone who’s birded for any length of time (Which bird is this? “Dark-Eyed Junco”, “Gambel’s Quail”, “Pileated Woodpecker”, “Great Egret” — I might ask that question of a 10 year old at a beginner’s birding walk…); the search by zip is funky. I live in 95xxx zip code, but according to their map, 95xxx is somewhere around Lake Shasta. I found navigation twitchy and button’s either too senstive or ignoring my finger pushing. Nice, but missing the fit and finish I’d expect to see. It feels like a quick hack.

Not true of the iBird stuff. Very polished and professional. It’s based on the workdone for WhatBird for Windows Mobile and Palm, and they’ve done a nice job of doing a version for the iPhone.

My recommendation: grab the regional version of iBird and see how you like it. I’d give Peterson’s guide a miss. It’s less expensive, but no bargain in comparison.

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