Audubon Bird Guide Reviews

UPDATE: I love AudubonBirdGuide , but both my wife and I *hate* the new interface! 😡 Whatever Audubon paid to have AudubonBirdGuide redesigned, they lost big-time. The new interface REQUIRES you to create an account, and it's almost impossible to easily find what you're looking for. Dropping my earlier 5-star rating to a generous 2 stars. This reeks.

My wife and I have never been "bird watchers", but since being able to enjoy our morning coffee outside every morning, we've taken to really enjoying the busy company of our feathered friends. I downloaded AudubonBirdGuide to help identify the calls, and WOW! AudubonBirdGuide is terrific. It helps identify the multitude of calls, shapes, colors, regions, etc, and has really opened up our appreciation and knowledge. To cap it off: We were trying to confirm a Carolina Wren on our patio this morning; I opened AudubonBirdGuide and started playing the different calls of the Carolina Wren, and the next thing we knew, this little guy had braved hopping right up next to where we were sitting, trying to locate where the calls were coming from! I silenced my phone momentarily, and he flew a few feet away, but as soon as I started the calls back up, here he came again, trying to find his invisible friend! That alone is enough to merit a 5-star rating for this incredible app. 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼

AudubonBirdGuide is easily my most used besides Safari. I love the explore feature; it’s given me so many tips on where to find great birding spots in my area (and great hiking too!) It also helps me know which birds to watch out for when traveling.

After choosing a spot, I can study all of its recently seen birds and brush up on their calls in just one or two clicks. (Plus, there are often three or more different sound samples for variety, and most all common noises a species makes are included.)

I keep my life list here and though I am relatively new to birding, I’ve added almost 60 new birds to my life list in the two years I’ve had this on my phone! It’s a great tool to improve birding skills, and I’ve definitely become a better birder since I downloaded this.

More to love:
1) It’s free!
2) You can download a “field guide” of bird information to ID without Wifi - a lifesaver for No Service or data-saving birding
3) You can set alarms to tell you when certain birds are seen in an area. I live in the north, so I have one set for snowy owls!
4) If you see something unfamiliar, AudubonBirdGuide can help you narrow down your choices based on characteristics like state, time of year, size, color, shape, voice, flight pattern, tail shape, habitat, and wing shape. Very helpful.

If you’re on the fence, please try AudubonBirdGuide. I can’t recommend it enough!

This update is making bird life miserable for me. I have been using AudubonBirdGuide for about 10 years. I am an avid birder and rely heavily on it for the bird info where you can search by your location and pull up all the birds in your location that have been reported. Now you can only search by Hotspots and it only shows you daily lists, which are incredibly incomplete. I just went on vacation to Austin, Texas. I have never been there and tried to figure out what birds I had the potential of seeing. This new app version was completely useless. It kind of made me want to cry because I couldn’t figure out what birds were around me. Sooooo frustrating! I went to hotspots and the format for that was nearly useless.

Why did you take this feature away after 10 years? Now it’s the beginning of migration season up here in New York and I have no way to know what’s coming in. The hotspots don’t help because they are so specific to that area, it won’t apply to where I live and bird. Please bring that feature back ASAP before it ruins the migration season we wait all year for.

This latest update, late March 2018, removes all the features I loved about my NatureShare app - adding favorites, commenting, exploring the latest posts across the USA - gone without so much as a warning (the blurb says some of the community features have been suspended - read all). To cap it all, my photos have the wrong aspect ratio and cut off the head of the bird - something I can't edit. AND, if I want to edit the location, AudubonBirdGuide freezes. That, and the fact that I am only allowed to post one photo per sighting, makes this update a terrible mess. So Audubon developers, please hurry up and roll out an update with these fixes. You really shouldn't have offered this update until AudubonBirdGuide was good and ready. Shame on you!

The good news is that I was able to download the Central Park Audubon app which still gives users full access to the NatureShare community and features.

I applaud the effort to merge NatureShare with eBird but please enhance the Audubon app to incorporate the wonderful NatureShare community features we know and love. eBird is so dry and dull by comparison.

I paid for AudubonBirdGuide and the latest update is with out a doubt the absolute worst update ever! It is the biggest mess ever! Terribly confusing to say the least! Not easy at all to navigate. Had I not paid fir this it would be deleted! I can not believe the powers that be, actually thought this was an improvement! It was so easy before this update! All you had to do was go to the contents/legend and click on what you wanted to find! This new and improved version is just horrible. I seriously doubt I will ever use it again! It would be nice if AudubonBirdGuide went back to the way it was! If it isn't broken...don't fix it! Maybe just maybe that since AudubonBirdGuide has to be paid for that a full account of what improvements and changes were to occur, could be sent to all who own AudubonBirdGuide, asking for opinions on the potential changes and then take a vote if the change us actually needed, or wanted! That would be a common curtesy for the people who paid fir AudubonBirdGuide!

Update: 5/4/18 Despite the updates to the major format change, it’s still pretty much unusable. Serious Q; why did you change it? I’m sure many of your long time users would be willing to give you useful feedback.
I bought AudubonBirdGuide a few years ago. As a novice birder, I was taught that in order to identify a bird, it helps to see what birds are in your area at that time. With the previous version of AudubonBirdGuide, It was so easy to find ‘Birds Near You’ or ‘Notable & Rare’ sightings. It was easy to click on a bird and find ‘descriptions’, ‘sounds’, and ‘sightings’. These are all gone, or at the least VERY hard to locate. If I am able to figure out what I’m possibly seeing, I have to get out of that screen and go find it elsewhere in order to see a picture or hear sound. By then the bird is gone... and oh well, too bad! Basically, it no longer intuitive like it was before. Of ALL the apps I have, this was the one I used the most. Now...well, I’m really sorry to say, it’s the most frustrating.

While I have since learned how to navigate this new version, it took my awhile to figure it out. I’m not a fan of the new sighting system that only shows what’s been seen very close to me. I preferred having a larger range so I could see what’s been sighted in a larger area, such as Galveston or Houston. Due to the update, I have to search up specific locations within those areas instead of one big picture which makes it somewhat more complicated than the original app, especially if you’re not familiar with the area you’re searching for.
In addition, AudubonBirdGuide is crashing terribly any time I try to scroll through sightings. Also, it logs me out every time I exit AudubonBirdGuide which is annoying to have to type my email and password in every single time. I can never finish checking out sightings because of the crashes. As of right now, AudubonBirdGuide is useless, which is disappointing since I paid a good bit of money on it.

This is my primary bird field guide, and I like it better than iBird which my husband uses. But, I’m really disappointed that I updated to the most recent version. When using the field guide, having the ability to sort on last or first “name” was a really important feature, and I miss it a lot. For example, looking at the Ducks & Geese family, you could sort by last, and all the geese would be together and all the ducks would be together. Unfortunately AudubonBirdGuide isn’t as functional as a field guide anymore. I would rather browse than search.

Also, when you’re exploring sightings they’re no longer linked to the species guide. So if you see that someone saw a Northern Goshawk close to you, and you wanted to learn more about that bird you have to click over to the field guide and navigate to it. Or search for it. Very kludgy.

New review: two years ago this was one of the worst examples of how to build a field guide to birds app. Today, with its major make over, its stands out as an big improvement.

My main negative comments remain the fact that there only photos (unlike Sibley which uses multiple drawings and iBird which is the only app with both drawings and photos.) Plus the photos can’t be zoomed larger to see more details. Further there are no field mark layers (unlike iBird) and few photos of females and juveniles.

On the positive side the content is much deeper and the range maps a big improvement (tho they also can’t be zoomed). Songs are about the same; meaning too few and no details on where they where recorded.

Previous review:
When AudubonBirdGuide became free I thought it bring a lot of new features. And with a name like Audubon I had high expectations. But I discovered that the Audubon organization had nothing to do with creating AudubonBirdGuide. In fact most Audubon members loath it and use iBird or Sibley.

Natureserve is way too hard to use. Why won't it find my location? Instead I have to always drag the pin from somewhere back east. This feature could do so much more.

But entire interface is just not well designed like National Geo or iBird.

I just started using the AudubonBirdGuide and really like it. I have been collecting my bird sightings for 30 years in a book which I will continue to do, but AudubonBirdGuide allows me to enter my photos as well. There is a glitch however, when it comes to entering the date; at first it let me enter the date with no problems, but after 30 entries it won’t let me enter any dates. The only dates it shows are for future dates (ie 2021...). So, I started entering the date of my sightings in the notes section, which is useless when it comes to searching. I even tried deleting AudubonBirdGuide and reloading it and it still doesn’t work, not on my iPhone or iPad. Also, it would be nice if there was a way to enter the data on my computer and have it sync with AudubonBirdGuide .

I can’t tell at all about the quality of the update or if it is better than the old version or not. That’s because I have been too busy trying to find the 60+ birds on my life list AudubonBirdGuide lost after updating. I went to the NatureShare web-site and still had my list, but entering each bird into the new app is a royal pain in the neck. E.g., if I’m entering in a bird I saw several years ago, I am twirling the “day” wheel for a long time. Then I have to twirl it back when I invariably go too far. Then sometimes forward again. Next, I have to zoom the map out laboriously, then scroll all the way across the country, in some cases, to re-enter where I saw the bird. What a pain in the neck! And I have to search through my life list for each bird to find the ones not included. AudubonBirdGuide is far from the only one with this type of problem, but come on now: THE DEVELOPERS KNEW THIS WOULD BE A PROBLEM BUT RELEASED A HALF BAKED APP UPDATE ANYWAY.

For the most part, AudubonBirdGuide is easy to use, and helpful in identifying birds you see, and birds you only hear. I have been surprised to find such a variety of birds at this location, where we have been for the past two and a half years… I would not have known what they were without going quickly to AudubonBirdGuide.
I am a little disappointed with the location and map part. It seems as though where I am, and my saved location I named “Home,”are never in the same place!
The few times I have not been able to figure out what kind of bird I am seeing, I just send photos to them, and I hear back within a couple of days.

AudubonBirdGuide has opened so many doors for me and my wife. Growing up, I’d always wondered about the actual names and facts about my local flora and fauna, and AudubonBirdGuide delivers that ability to easily identify that I’ve so yearned for since childhood. I’ve been able to positively identify pretty much every bird in my area and out of state through location features on AudubonBirdGuide . DEFINITELY allow AudubonBirdGuide to use your location, as it will then recommend known birds of the area, which makes identification extremely easy. The bird call samples on AudubonBirdGuide also help big time. If you’ve always wanted to know the names of the birds you see every day, get AudubonBirdGuide. Truly magnificent

I had to create an account to enter a list. Then it assumed what my current location was and named that “home”, both assumptions were incorrect. There seems to be no way to change them. Why keep track of where my sightings are if it can’t even tell where I am? If I go to “edit” my account info, the cursor shows up on the right edge of the screen. I can enter six characters only. And although there’s a “save” option above, in case one manages to make a change, it’s greyed out and doesn’t work. So I cannot edit my home to appear correctly, although I am working hard to attract more bird species to my feeders.

So many elementary problems! The only things that work in a logical manner are the parts about birds themselves. AudubonBirdGuide is much less useful than a field notebook. If there’s not a big makeover upcoming, I’m deleting it.

I have loved all of the Audubon apps and find them very useful. That is, the ones you still support. I love Audubon, but I am incredibly disappointed in the way you have handled the other apps including the guides on Butterflies, Fishes, Fishes of the Caribbean, Insects & Spiders, Mammals, Mushrooms, Reptiles & Amphibians, Trees, and Wildflowers. None of these apps can even be found on AudubonBirdGuide store anymore. I find it very disloyal to your customers to discontinue apps that they have purchased. If they were free, I wouldn't have a problem, but many of those apps won't even work anymore since IOS 11. Please update the apps or issue a refund to all of your customers.

I am so very sorry I “updated” to this new version. EVERYTHING I liked and used of the former version is GONE!!!! I used the old app to find new places near me to bird. This was good because it gave sightings within a 30 mile radius of my location. Often these sightings of new birds or migrants were in areas of the region new to me (I.e., fluddle), or some country road intersection. Impossible with the new version, as it “curates” sightings closest to one’s location. I don’t want to know about the Cardinal in the park down the street and miss the Avocet in a spring fluddle in a rural area 10 miles away from me! Also, the former version would give directions to hotspot or sighting locations; unfortunately the current version has removed this feature. I am EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTED with this new version, and will no longer recommend it to my birding friends as a tool to find new and interesting birds as they move through the state on migration.

I recently took a vertebrate zoology course and really enjoyed the class! Audubon was instrumental in facilitating my interest in ornithology and bird watching.

My favorite feature is being able to just click on a bird and get the identification information. The Bird ID feature is extremely helpful, it just makes seeing new species so much more exciting! Audubon provides scientific names, calls, habitats, breeding habits, etc. of hundred of species.

Going out in the morning to bird watch just a little way from my college or apartment is wonderful. Going outside into nature and learning classification skills has made learning biology as my major a great experience! Thanks, Audubon!

Even the term “birding” itself sounds like a nerdy version of an illegal act. But there were feeders outside our house when we bought it this fall and my kid wanted me to keep feeding the little beasties. Turns out seeing woodpeckers flit into the feeders, Cardinals brighten the back yard, and sparrows act like little flying teenagers was actually pretty entertaining.
I got tired of saying, “look at that bigger bird on the right. No. The other one,” to my kids so I looked for a way to find their real names.
That way is AudubonBirdGuide. Now I can enjoy the second nerdiest hobby in the privacy of my home! (First is is philately- look it up loser).
Seriously AudubonBirdGuide is quick to load, doesn’t crash, and help ID birds. Get it.

I assumed the glitchyness and tendency to crash was the fault of the aging iPod Touch I used it on. I should have read the reviews...
I use AudubonBirdGuide on my iPod so I’m not able to connect with data in the field. I HAVE to be able to download the field guide, or it’s useless! I started the ‘few minutes’ process at 6:05 pm. It was still loading when I returned home over three hours later.
In the six weeks since I’ve owned this device (6th gen iPod Touch) I have installed, force-quit, deleted, reinstalled and anything else I could think of, and AudubonBirdGuide still doesn’t work unless I’m home by my wifi which is hardly optimal birdwatching conditions.
I’m disappointed, because this really was my favorite app, especially for bird song. I’ve used it since the days when I had to pay for it! But I’m switching to Merlin for a free app, and buying Sibley. Sorry, it’s been good to know you.

I am making good use of this spot for keeping track of daily sightings on our farm, and where ID’ing birds has become even more helpful and accurate. It is free, simple to navigate, encouraging, provides a place to maintain basically a space to journal with sighting details, and more, including ability to ask to receive info when other birds are seen in my area. I highly recommend this for beginners as that is how I started and am gradually learning more also about various accessible birding areas, though mainly keep up with and record what we see on our property in the countryside.

I just used the newly updated app for the first time and I already miss the old app. I saw a bird flying that I didn’t recognize so I used the bird ID part of AudubonBirdGuide and it is worse than the old version. This new version has too many steps and I don’t like having to go back and forth among all of the characteristics I need to enter. The old version was much easier to use and worked just fine. If I’m out birding and I see a bird I don’t recognize I want to try and ID it quickly, not go through a bunch of steps to try and ID it. The results on this new app don’t seem as accurate as the old one and there seem to be a lot fewer results. I also don’t like the stories that take up most of AudubonBirdGuide . I understand you want to share news and information but AudubonBirdGuide is not the place to do it; or at least have a separate section for it. I also had to create a brand new account to use AudubonBirdGuide because it said it didn’t recognize my email address. I wish I hadn’t updated AudubonBirdGuide and I don’t think I’ll be keeping it much longer. It’s not helpful at all.

This is my primary bird field guide, and I like it better than iBird which my husband uses. But, I’m really disappointed that I updated to the most recent version. When using the field guide, having the ability to sort on last or first “name” was a really important feature, and I miss it a lot. For example, looking at the Ducks & Geese family, you could sort by last, and all the geese would be together and all the ducks would be together. Unfortunately AudubonBirdGuide isn’t as functional as a field guide anymore. I would rather browse than search.

Also, when you’re exploring sightings they’re no longer linked to the species guide. So if you see that someone saw a Northern Goshawk close to you, and you wanted to learn more about that bird you have to click over to the field guide and navigate to it. Or search for it. Very kludgy.