National Geographic Birds: Field Guide to North America app for iPhone and iPad
National Geographic presents an innovative, beautiful, and interactive field guide to the birds of North America for all your Apple devices. Whether you are new to bird-watching or already an expert, this completely updated and redesigned app makes spotting, identifying, and understanding birds easier than ever before. From its detailed illustrations to its easy-to-use interface, this is the one-stop resource you need to identify and track every bird you see.
• The most comprehensive app on the market with 995 species.
• Robust search/sort/filter functionality—with real-time results—helps you locate species quickly and easily.
• Track all of your sightings in the My Journal section by adding location details, weather, photos, notes, and more with just the touch of a finger.
• Start your own life list, or peruse numerous lists compiled by National Geographic, including longest-distant migrants, endangered species, and species most likely to be spotted in regional hot-spots such as Cape Hattaras and Madera Canyon.
• Test your birding knowledge, and increase your identification skills, with custom-created quizzes, curated by experts at National Geographic.
• The Tool Kit feature contains all the essentials every birder needs—learn about birding ethics and must-have gear, as well as exclusive videos of bird vocalizations. A real-time newsfeed keeps users abreast of breaking news in the birding world.
• And so much more!
Each species is accompanied by gorgeous full-color illustrations—the trademark of our best-selling companion book, National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America— showing subspecies, juvenile birds, and seasonal plumage changes, as well as images of resting, roosting, swimming, and flying. Users can pinch and zoom to get a better view of the details. To make identification even easier, we’ve included field-mark annotations, which users can toggle off and on by tapping on the screen.
More than 800 up-to-date range maps show where birds can be seen in each season. In addition to winter and summer ranges, each map now features migration ranges and 40 subspecies range maps as well. Vivid color-coding and a drop-down map key make the smallest details crystal clear.
With its simple and smart navigation beautiful interface, and easy-to-use features, this app is sure to be a hit with every birder—from novice to expert!
**A School Library Journal Top App of 2013**
Pros and cons of National Geographic Birds: Field Guide to North America app for iPhone and iPad
National Geographic Birds: Field Guide to North America app good for
The earlier version of this app was simply pathetic, basically just scanned pages.
They have finally joined the smartphone age and made an app that takes advantage of the smartphone interface. It is intuitive and loaded with great information. Very well designed and it finally gives the Sibley app some real competition. Well worth the money for any serious birder.
Suggestions:
- Allow the image plates to be resized to the full screen.
- eBird integration for lists
I have pretty much all of the main birding apps for my phone. This previous version of this about was my absolute least favorite of them all. However, since the redesign it has now become my hands down favorite. Very well done.
One thing I feel that is missing is filtering by species. I find it helpful to be able to narrow your search by species when trying to identify an unknown bird.
This is a very easy app to use. The search feature is simple to follow and the illustrations are very clear. I wish that the birds of Mexico and Central America were included or have their own app.
All species that I have had to look up, I have managed to find, so to me it seems that most species have been inluded.
I love this app but Im upset because the quizzes dont work for me. And I really want to ace them
I use this app weekly, and cant get a better app for the price. Would like to see an update with more calls added and real life pictures. Have a hard time identifying some birds because the artwork is a little off on some species. I know I could use google images along with, but most times Im outta cell coverage.
Overall its a great starter birding app!!
Wonderful app with beautiful illustrations and plenty of information about many birds. Waiting for same app with birds of Europe
Some bad moments
images are top notch.
app works but needs refinement.
the makers have promised the improvements needed such as more flexible searching and notetsking ability.
It would also be nice to zoom in on images similar to the zoom in the Photo app.
Pluses
+ bird illustrations are high quality National Geographic illustrations
+ song recordings included & easily accessible
+ less costly than competition
Minuses
-plates are *much* too small (about 1/4-1/2 the size of the same plates in the field guide) to see real detail
-search frustrating (four different search types, if you search for "Goldfinch" hits only appear in one)
-lists similar species, but does not provide links to them to do immediate comparisons
I purchased this app thinking itd have to be great - I mean, its from National Geographic right?
Meh, not so much.
There are no photos at all. In my opinion, illustrations are an artists interpretation of what the bird looks like, and quite often dont even really look the bird - I like the photos for comparison.
There is also no way to make any sort of list. I wanted to select the birds that I have in my area and add them to some sort of list, but you cant do that in this app.
I bought this app and iBird Explorer Canada - there is no comparison. Buy iBird and leave this one here (unless you want to use this is a back up to the other).
I get the feeling that Nat Geo rushed to get this in to the App Store and didnt really put the effort in to developing it. It should be a lot better than it is.
This book does not have very many photographs as I was expecting. In fact I havent found ANY at this point. They are all sketches. It is hard to navigate. iBird Explorer is FAR BETTER.
This app crashes as soon as I go to the Overview or any other tab. I am so disappointed. I really thought that NG would have a better product and I paid so much for it.
This application keeps crashing, plus i had several lists saved and all the lists and data have been lost