Unlocking Your eBird Journey: Meet numbird 🐦📈
If you’re a birder, you likely know the feeling: you spend hours in the field recording sightings on eBird, but when it comes time to actually look at your data, you’re often left clicking through static web pages or waiting for slow reloads.
Enter numbird, a clean, powerful, and privacy-focused iOS app designed by Niall Bell for the “birding data nerd.” It’s built on a simple premise: your birding history is a treasure trove of stories, and you should be able to explore them instantly, anywhere, even when you’re deep in the forest without a signal.
What makes numbird different?
While the official eBird app is perfect for recording, numbird is designed for analysis. By importing your eBird data export, numbird processes your entire history locally on your device.
Here’s a glimpse at what you can do:
- Visualise Your Growth: From sparkline charts on your dashboard to species accumulation graphs, see exactly how your life list has grown year-over-year.
- Deep-Dive Analytics: Explore “Phenology” heatmaps to see when you typically record specific species, or check “Productive Times” to find out exactly when you’re most successful in the field.
- A Media-First Experience: numbird turns your sightings into a visual story. Browse a dedicated Photo Stream or listen through your Audio Life List with native players and spectrographs powered by the Macaulay Library.
- Smart Exploration: Use Universal Search to ask questions like “Where did I last see a Dipper?” or “Phenology for Anna’s Hummingbird.” It understands natural language and jumps you straight to the data.
- Global Context: Integrated with GBIF data, you can view Global Range Maps for any species to see how your personal sightings fit into the bigger picture of world-wide bird populations.
Built by a birder, for birders
Niall created numbird to solve his own frustration with the lack of fast, mobile-friendly analysis tools. Because it’s a personal labor of love, the app is free to use and respects your privacy, all your data analysis happens on your phone, not a server.
Whether you’re trying to track your “Yorkshire” county list or just want a beautiful way to revisit your favourite birding memories, numbird gives your data the home it deserves.
Ready to start? Download your eBird data, import it into numbird, and see your birding history in a whole new light.
Support the project: If you love the app, you can buy Niall a coffee
(https://buymeacoffee.com/niallbell) to help keep the project flying!
