Costa Rica Birds App Reviews

This app sucks, most of the photos are of poor quality, the info is sparse, the buttons to move between pages dont function properly, there is no way to compare birds beside each other. Save your money and dont buy this app.

Its a good app with a good number of photos and songs. When I click similar species it doesnt give me a back button to go back to where I was. You have to reset and go back to the bird which I find kind of annoying.

This app is well worth the price, and worth taking along birding. In effect a complete field guide --though only with photos, not illustrations -- the inclusion of both range maps and audio calls makes it hugely useful. There is also field guide text giving field marks, status and habits. The app is well laid out to fit on the iPhone screen, making it nicely portable for use in the field. It also works well on iPad, using the larger screen to show its photos to full benefit. My only wish would be a time bar when playing the audio calls. Also, the species with no audio still have the audio icon, just paler but in the same color. This is too subtle. Better would be a different icon indicating no audio is available or a clearer color difference, e.g. Red for none (this info could be displayed in the list view as well -- there is room, especially on iPad . In fact, you could add audio playback buttons in the list view.

I feel we were ripped off paying a premium amount for an APP that is not at all useful or user friendly. Yes, the pictures are fine but unless you are already very familiar with the birds of CR, using this app for identification is frustration personified. The checklist feature is useless. Nowhere can you access or see a compilation of the birds in the checklist that you have seen. Checking the seen button in the notes feature does not add the bird to your checklist. Also there is no way to edit the date and time of a sighting. The date and time recorded is fixed to the time you click the seen button in the app. Yes you could make additional notes for the correct time and date but then why bother.....

This app is very useful with songs for most birds and often more than one picture. But it is unfinished. The problems are two. First it is not easy to find a bird in the list if you dońt know its full name, or group, or family. There should be a search bar for all search lists with keywords. Second problem: the notes section is useful, but there should be one textbox to add comments, like the date seen, the place, maybe more than one sighting, the gender seen. It does not need to be a complex tabulation, just space to write notes. And after having saved the note, one should be able to go back to thumbnails.

I purchased this app for my iPod Touch 3. I like it: Its easy to use and has excellent content. Only, not all birds have vocalisations. I can only hope it will be updated. This expressed, dont hesitate to get it in advance of birding in Costa Rica.

I love birding in Costa Rica, but carrying around a printed field guide is not a favorite part of it. This new app is just what I have been waiting for! It doesnt have all the birds that can be seen in Costa Rica - for example, it doesnt have the Solitary Eagle. But it does have everything youre likely to see, and Im sure the developers will continue to seek out and photograph those rarely seen species that are missing. I like the search features and I like being able to see the birds either by alphabetical listing or by family. You can mark in notes whether the bird was seen or heard, which I very much like. And, the maps help a lot. I can hardly wait for updates, such as being able to make lists for ebird.

Few and poor quality photos, poorly organized, many likely birds missing. This app is NOT worth the cost!!! Worst app Ive ever purchased.

We’re going to CR soon and I read about this; read about the developers; got it and ran it through some paces. It could use more pics of some of the birds but several are well illustrated. I cannot judge the correctness of data about the birds but two of the developers earn their livings leading bird watching tours in Costa Rica, where they all live; I can’t imagine they’d want to be associated with shoddy information. As I write there are 578 birds in the app. You can filter them by Group, by Region/Stratum, by Color, Size, Head Pattern, Underparts, Back and Sound. Each one (I haven’t viewed them all) has information consisting of Field Marks, Description, Habitat, a range map and a place for you to write notes. Of the birds in the filter you can sort them alphabetically or by group or family. I’m impressed by the job they’ve done and I look forward to using the app in CR. If they had a few more pics and some more sounds I’d give it a 5.

Great photos! Super app support! Havent used it in Costa Rica yet, but am excited to do so this summer!

app helpful but has major needs. If looking at a bird, you cannot go back to where you started looking at that bird, but it reverts to the beginning. You then have to scroll thru it all again. Also no way to put in a search for bird looking for, for example, a tanager, but have to scroll down thru everything. Needs major update.

I used this guide in Southern Mexico, not being able to find a local guide book. I used it a lot, and found it at times frustrating. Why no Spanish names for birds? No search for bird names first or last. Visiting in May I would have appreciated if the filter function could have excluded the migrating birds.

I used this in Nicaragua and it was a big help. Shortcomings: alphabetical listing is by the first word in the common name. You cant search for "dove, inca" or "dove, mourning", you have to search for "inca" or "mourning" which makes no sense at all. The photos are wonderful. Families are listed, but not in alphabetical order, a real drag. It wouldnt take much to make this a great ap for us amateur birders.

This app has a lot of data, and it is great to be able to carry around all of the birding info in your pocket. However, as another commenter pointed out, it is hard to search. You can filter birds by color, etc., but you cannot search by name. If you want to find a Quetzal for instance, the only way to do it is to scroll down the list of 622 birds until you get to “R” (R because it is listed by its full name … resplendent quetzal). if you are an expert birder that is comfortable with bird names, etc., this app might be useful. For a beginning birder that just wants to get an idea of what they are seeing on a trip to Costa Rica, it is not very useful.

The alphabetical list by Name is on the first name and is virtually useless. The alphabetical list by Group is sorted on the name of the first bird in the group. For example Grosbeaks, Buntings & Allies is listed under G. You would have to know the Buntings are in this group, since you can’t look it up alphabetically. There is a workaround. Click on Filter Bird List top right of screen. Click on Group, the first box. If Alphabetic is showing on the top right of the screen, select it and an Alphabetic listing of the bird groups appears. Much easier to scroll through this list to pick up other birds in the list, for example Sparrows in the Group Seedeaters, Finches & Sparrows. Selecting the list of interest allows you to return to the bird filter screen, shows the number of birds found, and by selecting <Back at top right returns to the bird list showing only the selected group. The alphabetical list by Group has two selections for G, S, and T. None for F, R, or V. Searching for a Orioles using the search engine as described above returned 0 birds. If this happens try resetting. Use of hyphenation in birds with two last names, like Bush-Thrush, is inconsistent. Sometimes it is Bush Thrush. There are numerous examples of this in both first and last name fields. It would be very helpful to use the Audubon approach lumping birds by how they look, such as Long Legged Waders, Ducklike , Shorebirds etc. I ended up entering Family, Group, First Name, Last Name in an Excel spreadsheet allowing sorting by any of these headers, then adding a column with the Audubon categorization to search on to make a quick reference guide for the field.

As a beginner I think it could use more filters such as throat patch or head color. Also more pictures than just one to show the opposite sex or from different angles. The ability to enlarge the photo would also be helpful (I have an iphone5).

Although I may never completely untether from the book format field guide, this app superbly supplements the most current such field guide. Of the three named contributors/developers, two are among the most highly regarded birding guides in Costa Rica (both mentioned most recently by Richard Garrigues in the acknowledgments of the second edition of his field guide), and their expertise is ably demonstrated in the species accounts. They continue to add new species , new photos,new range maps and new sound recordings. And this birder is grateful to the developers for NOT following the trend of so many. Their updates are not limited to devices with only the most current OS. The current app release 3 can be used on devices with OS 5 or later, which means that I retain full functionality on my iPot Touch 4G. Anyone interested in the birds of Central America will enjoy this app, and birders will welcome the availability of supplementary information and bird sound recordings in the field.

This app is given 3-star rating only based on nice photos but should get only 1-star if based on descriptions of birds which is totally lacking. And what self-respecting Costa Rica bird guide wouldnt even include the national bird of Costa Rica? This one doesnt. It is overpriced despite the nice photos due to missing data.

We went on a two week birding trip in Costa Rica. I had ordered a plastic bird card in addition to the book. I saw this app and thought it was only a few dollars more than the plastic card so I downloaded it. In the field, I stopped carrying the book and card and only used the app. The rest of the group were constantly asking to see it even though our excellent guide had the book. The only con is that the families are listed under the scientific name rather than common. When you type in hummingbird, not all the listed hummingbirds come up. We have been birding in a number of Central and South American countries where even finding a decent book was difficult. We were delighted to find this great app. The other reviewer stated that the national bird, clay colored thrush, is not listed. I just checked the app and it is there. Suggest he use the search function at the top of the lists. You have to scroll up to get to it.

Just downloaded this app. It seems like it should work for my trip, but I was surprised at how many species had no image (I think about 100). Many of these I have in my North America guides, but I dont understand why they are not included here along with the species descriptions.