eBird Alert! vs SnowRaven

eBird Alert! shows rare bird sightings in your area, found from the checklists your fellow birders have submitted to eBird -- a global online database of bird records used by hundreds of thousands of birders around the world. Features - Select how nearby and how recent the sightings can be. - Select which nearby county in which to find birds. - See rarities or all local birds. - Open a sighting location in Apple or Google Maps. - See all sighting comments for a particular location. - Get identification details and photos to help you spot the bird,. - If you spot it, add it to your checklist in the eBird app. Privacy - eBird Alert! requires your location to find nearby birds. It will never upload your location, or any other data, to any server.

SnowRaven is a birding data explorer for the records you already keep. It reads your eBird and Macaulay Library exports and gives you weather and tides for your checklists, your history with every species, life-list statistics and an interactive map, on your own device. WHAT'S INSIDE • Weather: paste an eBird checklist ID and get a weather and tide summary ready to drop into the checklist comment, or look up the conditions where you are now, or the forecast for any place and time ahead. The Weather/tide Planner lays out the coming sunrises and sunsets, each with its tide and forecast weather. • Statistics: a dashboard built from your eBird backup: life-list totals and growth, milestones, and when and where you bird. A weather section reads back the weather blocks SnowRaven and RainCrow write into checklist comments. • Map Explorer: your sightings on an interactive map, with nearby eBird hotspots and where species new to you were reported recently. Counties shade by your counts or by how complete your county list is, with a California Breeding Bird Atlas overlay. • Species Detail: your whole history with one bird: sightings, field notes, breeding codes and a map of every observation, with a weather card showing the skies and temperatures you have found this bird in. • Calendar: a year of your birding as twelve month grids, each day shaded by how many species you saw. Fold the years together, or narrow it to a single species. • Multimedia: your life list as a media checklist: which species you have photographed, recorded and filmed, and which you still need. • Breeding Codes: every species you have recorded breeding evidence for, as a matrix against eBird's breeding codes, colored by evidence tier. • Checklists: your checklists as whole outings: search every comment you have written, and filter by what an outing has. • List Comparer: two life lists side by side, or any two public checklists: what they share and what only one has. • Named Birds: tag an individual bird by name in a species comment and SnowRaven gathers everything you have on it: sightings, places, a timeline, its own media. PRIVACY Private by default, and in your control: no account, no analytics, no telemetry, no server we run. Your eBird backup, Macaulay Library export, and API keys are stored only on your device unless you turn on iCloud syncing between your devices, and anything you sync goes to your own iCloud account and nowhere else. When you ask for live data, the app talks directly to the service that has it, using your own free API keys where one is needed. The full privacy policy is at snowraven.dtgibson.com/privacy.html. WHAT YOU'LL NEED Two free API keys, entered once in Settings: an eBird key, and an OpenWeather key for weather. Most tabs also read your eBird backup and, for the media features, an optional Macaulay Library export. Tides and maps work without any key. SnowRaven is an independent, free, open source project. It works alongside eBird and the Macaulay Library, building on the exports they let you download. It is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Also available free for Mac and Windows, and self-hosted on a Raspberry Pi, at snowraven.dtgibson.com.