BirdTrack

British Trust for Ornithology

About this app

Want an easy way to record the birds you see, and keep track of what you have seen? The BirdTrack app makes recording your sightings easy and your birdwatching more rewarding; plus your sightings support research and conservation at the local, national and global scale. Whether you want to record single sightings of those special birds or make a list of all the birds you see whilst birdwatching on a local patch you can do both from the palm of your hand. This free app links directly to your BirdTrack account on the web and acts as your digital notebook, enabling you to quickly and easily record the information you want for the birds (and some other wildlife groups) you see.

With our app, you can:
• Select the species you saw from an illustrated checklist of the most likely species based on BirdTrack data for your location and the time of year.
• Offline mapping and observation recording, enabling use in places with no data connection.
• Keep records of birds seen anywhere in the world.
• See suggestions of local birdwatching places; add records for these popular places to help monitor their bird populations.
• Add sightings for some other taxa groups, including amphibians, butterflies, dragonflies, mammals, orchids, and reptiles. (UK only).
• View and edit previous sightings directly on your device.
• View a map of recent sightings made by the BirdTrack community.
• Keep track of your year and life lists, plus see lists of ‘target’ species seen by other BirdTrack users.
• Option to share your sightings via social media.
• Add optional information to your sightings, including breeding evidence, plumage details, and sensitive record settings to control the visibility of your records.
• Sightings are seamlessly synchronised with your BirdTrack account, so you can see all your observations whether you are viewing via your device or via the website.

Developed by the British Trust for Ornithology, on behalf of the BirdTrack partnership.

Ratings and reviews

Really useful to have this app on my phone to replace the 'pocket notepad' and keep a complete list of birds seen on a walk, or to log occasional sightings. I created an account on the website FIRST and registered to use Birdtrack, I also used the main website to create my 'Places'. The app is only a subset of the full functionality of the website. I'm glad I was not put off by the poor reviews below.

The updated app (autumn 2022) is superb. Very straightforward to set up sites, add and delete data, and I especially like the map-based way of seeing what other people have seen in recent days/weeks. A big advance is being able to edit lists within the app and resubmit. And since the bird clubs in the areas I most frequent can access the records, I know that they are available for conservation and bird-recording by others.

Tried to log on and register for recording our birds but the app refused to allow any password as acceptable. I tried a random mix of punctuation, numbers, and capital and lower case letters at a length of 30 characters and it still said it was "inadequate". Why does it need to be secure? It's a list of birds in my garden!

What’s new

The home screen will show any notifications, such as record queries, and allow you to interact with them to provide information or update your records.

This version also contains bug fixes and improvements, including:
• Species infrequently recorded in the area are highlighted in the checklist.
• Unexpected and high count warnings are flagged via notifications.
• Community checklists for a place (+/- 2 weeks) are cached once loaded, for faster subsequent loads. Pull-to-refresh forces an update.