The Best Eco App for Wildlife Conservation

From calculating your carbon footprint to observing and reporting wildlife in your local area, eco apps can help people live greener and more sustainably. Birdwatching app and social media platform, Birda, launched to aid global conservation efforts, whilst also elevating a family friendly hobby. Proud to share all user’s bird sightings with the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), the app helps scientists to understand more about the world’s bird species and their habitats. Birda allows the app’s users to explore, appreciate, and protect the nature that surrounds them through a free, easy-to-use tool for logging the birdlife around – all they have to do is head out for a walk and look up.

About Birda
Launched in 2022 and the fastest growing birdwatching app, Birda helps you identify and log the birds around you while turning the discovery and exploration of birdlife and the outdoors into a game. Birda uses gamification in the form of challenges, leaderboards and cool badges to keep motivating you to get outside and birdwatch.

In addition to an ever-growing species guide which offers thousands of bird reference, and user generated photos to help identify the nuances of each species, Birda has incredible integration with location data which means that users can find top birdwatching locations anywhere on the globe.

To top it all off, by using Birda, you help conservationists and scientific researchers by sharing your bird sightings. Researchers use anonymous sighting records to better understand migration patterns and the effectiveness of conservation efforts. This helps experts put the proper measures in place to protect and safeguard birds.

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 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’ 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 birdwatching 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 the launch of the app:

“Our mission is to promote the enjoyment and appreciation of birdwatching as a means of connecting people with nature. We believe that people need to experience the natural world before they fight to protect it. We believe that nature is for everyone, and we know that spending time connecting with it makes people happier and healthier. Whether you’re a seasoned birdwatcher or just starting out, we want everyone to feel included and welcomed.

“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.