From South Africa to London: Entrepreneur quits international corporate career to launch birdwatching app

Hailing from, South Africa, a country heavily renowned for its bird watching, John and Natalie White saw opportunity to elevate the birdwatching experience internationally, transforming it from an individual hobby to an inclusive community activity. Moving to the UK and founding their revolutionary birdwatching app and social media platform, Birda is aimed at curious people who want to deepen their connection with nature – created for anyone who loves being outdoors.

John, a South African native, is the son of a British father and Afrikaans mother and has spent a childhood and more in the bush. Now, with his MBA and several years of banking and consultancy experience under his belt, he is following his entrepreneurial heart, which has an indisputable passion for wildlife. It is this passion that has without doubt been the driving force behind the creation of Birda. Natalie is originally from the UK and after living with John in Cape Town for ten years focusing on their app, has described their birdwatching venture as their ‘third child’. Since her first safari trip in South Africa in 2010, her evolving knowledge and enthusiasm for wildlife is nothing short of contagious, bringing the venture back to her hometown in the UK – where John and Natalie are based now.

This year, Birda’s users are encouraged to participate in the ‘Greater London Challenge 2023’ where birdwatchers will spot as many species as they can within the M25. Their sightings will then be sent to researchers to help with conservation efforts, with all Birda’s user finds being sent to the GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

App Features
No Expensive Kit Needed
Birda turns every iPhone into an intuitive yet powerful tool for logging the birds you see – whether you know what they are or not. The interface is user-friendly for casual backyard bird admirers and serious birdwatchers alike. You can either log each bird you spot one at a time as you see it or log multiple bird sightings as part of a longer birding session. Track your progress by building lists of all the species you’ve spotted.

Curate Your Bird Collections
Rather than filing all your bird sightings on one ‘all-time’ life list, Birda generates sub-level lists based on time and geographic location. For example, you can see a breakdown of each sighting you’ve logged over the last month or year and where you saw it.

You can also have a ‘home list’; Birda will automatically add the sightings you log within a radius of 500m around your home to this list. This privacy zone means the exact location of sightings at, or close to, your home is hidden from everyone except you.

Connect with Nature, Share with Your Community
Get to know the wonderful world of birdlife all around you with Birda’s location-aware species lists. When you add a sighting record, the species list Birda shows you only contains the birds that have been seen in your general location (a +/-60km radius around you). This makes it simple to find the correct species and avoid confusing similar ones.

More advanced birders can choose the taxonomy they’d prefer to use. Birda includes the IOC – International Community of Ornithologists – Clements and Birdlife taxonomies and will assign one to you automatically based on your country, but you can change this in your settings

Share Your Birding Adventures
If you don’t know which species you’ve seen, simply post a picture of it and flag it as ‘unidentified’. When you do this, your followers are notified and asked to help with identifying what you’ve seen. Have fun watching the votes fly in for various species before accepting the suggestion you think best fits your feathered friend.

Make birding even more fun by keeping an eye on what your friends, family, or followers have spotted. Compete to collect species and unlock achievements.

Disconnect to Reconnect
Disconnect from the rat race and reconnect with nature completely by using Birda offline. Use offline mode in remote places where no signal is available or choose to turn your connection off anywhere. Some components will be unavailable offline but will reappear as soon as you are online again.

Get Happy with Healthy Competition
Have fun competing with your Birda followers within the app to collect observations and see how many species you can spot. Why not compete in person too? Get outdoors with friends, family, or members of the Birda community. Enjoy time in the natural world together and log as many sightings as you can.

Birda is also great for teams, brand building, and community outreach. Encourage connection and competition between colleagues or companies. Create customized challenges for your brand.

Achieve and Protect
In Birda, you can earn individual badges for specific goals and species, compete with your followers to see who can stay at the top of the leaderboard, and participate in local and national birdwatching challenges.

All the while, you’ll be helping conservationists protect a myriad of bird species. Anonymous combined logs from the app can be used by scientists and environmental protection organizations to create a picture of species movement. This will help to put the proper measures in place to support and safeguard them. You’ll also find local conservation activities to join and projects to donate to through the app.

John and Natalie White, Birda Co-Founder’s, discuss their new app:
“Having worked for two large multinationals, I realised that corporate life was not what I wanted. Together, Natalie and I had an idea to turn our passion for wildlife and the outdoors into a business. We launched our first website and mobile app in 2013 for users to share their wildlife sightings from parks and reserves across Southern Africa. Life’s been an epic adventure ever since, and I look forward to continuing it with Birda.” – John White, Birda Co-Founder.

“The healing power of nature was paramount in getting me through my struggles with cancer. It’s motivated me to do more to protect our natural world, inspire others to do the same, and leave a legacy for my daughters.” – Natalie White, Birda Co-Founder.