Birding journal for iPhone

Say the bird.
Keep watching it.

BirdNote is a personal birding journal you fill by speaking. Hold the button, say “Spotted Towhee”, and it is in your checklist before you have lowered your binoculars. No typing, no signal required, no bird missed while you looked at a phone — and every bird pinned to the exact spot you found it.

Download on the App Store Free. No advertising, no third-party trackers.
  • Log by voice
  • Works with no signal
  • Life list
  • GPS trail, bird by bird
  • 14,000+ species on device
  • eBird import & export

A morning, start to finish

Six o’clock, no bars, hands full

You park where the track gives out and start walking. There is no signal here — there is never any signal here, which is part of why the birding is good. You press Start once and put the phone in your pocket.

A towhee scratches under the coyote brush. You hold the button on your chest and say it, and you are still watching when it hops up onto the branch. Nothing was typed. Nothing was spelled. You did not look down.

An hour later, at the top of the ridge, a hawk. You say “Red-tailed Hawk” and keep it in the glass all the way across the valley.

At the car you press Stop. By the time you are home the morning has written itself: eighteen species, each with the time you saw it and the exact spot on the track where you were standing. Nothing to type up at the kitchen table, because it was never a rough note in the first place.

That is the whole idea. Birding is a thing you do with your eyes and your ears, and the app should not ask for either.

The part that changes how you bird

Say it and keep watching

Every other way of recording a bird costs you the bird. A keyboard wants two hands and both eyes; by the time you look up, the flock has moved on and you are guessing at what the second one was.

Log a bird without breaking your gaze

Hold the button on the phone in your hand, in your pocket, on a strap. One second, no looking down. The bird is still there when you finish.

Talk the way you would to a friend

“Three mallards.” “Great White Egret.” Counts and the regional names you actually use are understood, so you are not translating yourself into a search box.

It expects birds, so it hears birds

Recognition leans on the species genuinely recorded where you are standing. That is why a Pyrrhuloxia comes back as a bird rather than as the nearest English phrase — and why you are not repeating yourself in the wind.

Nothing to lose in a valley

Your voice becomes text on the phone itself. No signal is needed and no audio is sent anywhere, so the mode you rely on most is the one that cannot be taken away by the terrain.

Wrong bird? Bin it and move on

Each entry appears for a few seconds with a bin beside it. Say the next bird and the last is kept. You are never held up confirming something while a warbler works along the hedge.

Never unlock the phone at all

While you are out, the lock screen carries Add a bird. Cold hands, gloves, a strap around your neck — tap it and you are already speaking.

What you have when you get home

A morning you can read back

A list of species is a receipt. What a birder wants years later is the morning itself: which day, which place, what the weather was doing, and the bird that turned up where nothing usually does.

Your notebook’s habits, kept

Birds sit under the day and the place you saw them, with counts, notes and the time each species appeared — the way you would have written it by hand, without the hour spent writing it up.

The dawn walk and the garden stay separate

Two outings in a day are two entries, each with its own place and its own list, so a quick look off the deck never pollutes the morning you drove an hour for.

Remembered something on the drive home?

Add it. Fix a count, correct a place name, move a pin. A record you are not allowed to correct is one you quietly stop trusting — and stop keeping.

Watch a year take shape

Your life list, this year’s lifers, and the days you got out — as a grid rather than a total, so you can see the shape of your birding. The same views sit on your home screen, so it is there without opening anything.

The thing paper cannot do

Where along the hedge was it?

Every birder who works a patch has asked this and had no way to answer. A species list says the bird was somewhere on a three-mile walk. BirdNote says it was forty yards past the second gate, at 07:12, and shows you.

Learn your patch properly

Walk the same route enough times and the pins start to teach you something: the corner the wrens hold, the end of the lagoon the waders prefer, how far up the canyon the migrants get.

Take someone back to the bird

“Down the track, past the willows.” Or the actual spot, to the metre, with the time you were standing there. Useful when it was good, and useful when somebody doubts you.

Enough for a survey

Each observation carries the fix taken when you logged it — not the car park you set off from — so a transect walked properly comes out as data rather than an anecdote.

Works where the road ends

The route comes from GPS, which asks nothing of the network, and the map you have already looked at is kept for next time. The canyon that has no signal still draws.

The rare bird stays your business

Exact coordinates never leave your journal. If you publish the outing, the location is rounded to about a kilometre and the route is a separate decision — so a nest site does not become a pin on the internet.

A shelf of walks, not a wall of dates

Each outing keeps a small drawing of the route you covered, so scrolling your journal feels like leafing through mornings rather than reading a ledger.

The rest of it

The small things that decide whether you keep using it

Find out what is about

Before you drive somewhere, see what has been reported there lately — searched over the area you are actually looking at on the map, not a fixed circle around your house.

Show the morning, when you want to

Outings you choose to publish reach birders nearby. Writing your journal and publishing from it are separate steps, so nothing goes out while you are still in the field deciding what you saw.

Search that works in a hide

Fourteen thousand species live on the phone, with the alternate names and four-letter codes you already use. It answers instantly and never asks whether you have coverage.

Your records stay yours

Bring your eBird history in; take everything out whenever you like, in a form other software reads. Nothing here is a hostage.

Readable at arm’s length

Generous type, high contrast, and buttons big enough to hit with cold hands — in low light, at dawn, wearing gloves, without your reading glasses.

Nothing between you and the birds

No advertising. No third-party trackers. No streak nagging you to open it. It is a notebook, and notebooks do not want anything from you.

How it works

What using it actually looks like

  1. 1

    Start birding

    One tap at the gate, then the phone goes back in your pocket.

  2. 2

    Hold and say the bird

    “Spotted Towhee.” “Three mallards.” Your eyes never leave the bird.

  3. 3

    It lands in the checklist

    With the time, and the spot on the track where you were standing.

  4. 4

    Stop, and read it back

    The morning is already written by the time you reach the car.

Privacy

What stays on your phone stays on your phone

An account is required so your journal syncs across your devices and survives a lost phone. Read the privacy policy.

Questions

Frequently asked

Can I really log birds by voice while birding?

Yes — it is what the app is built around. Hold the microphone button and say the bird's name and it goes into your checklist. You can say a count as well: “three mallards”. Speech becomes text on the iPhone itself, so no audio is sent anywhere and it works with no signal.

Does BirdNote work without a signal?

Yes. Every entry is written to your phone first and sent to the server whenever a connection turns up. Species search, voice logging and your whole journal work in airplane mode — which is the ordinary case in a marsh, a canyon, or a coastal reserve.

Does it identify birds from their song or a photo?

No, and deliberately. BirdNote listens for the name you say, not for the bird. Identification apps such as Merlin answer a different question, and BirdNote does not try to replace them — it records what you have already identified.

How many species does it know?

Around 14,000 — every species in the GBIF backbone taxonomy, plus the alternate names birds go by regionally, held on the device. Four-letter banding codes work too.

Does it record where each bird was, or just the outing?

Each bird. Every sighting carries the GPS fix taken at the moment you logged it and the time, placed along the trail you walked — so a mile between two warblers shows as a mile. Useful for a transect or a patch you work regularly. Those exact coordinates stay in your journal; anything you publish is rounded to about a kilometre.

Is this a replacement for eBird?

It is a personal journal rather than a scientific database. Import your existing eBird records and export everything you log here at any time, so BirdNote sits alongside eBird rather than locking anything in.

Will it publish where I saw a rare bird?

Only if you choose to share that outing, and then the location is coarsened to about a kilometre. Exact coordinates stay in your journal, and photo GPS is stripped on upload. A nest site or a roost stays where you found it.

What does it cost?

BirdNote is free, with no advertising and no third-party trackers.

What do I need to run it?

An iPhone running iOS 26 or later.

Try it on tomorrow’s walk

Free, on the App Store. Take it out once and see whether you look at your phone less.

Download on the App Store

Questions or a bug? feedback@rivolu.com — read by the people building it.