All Birds Colombia

App review

Just one day before leaving for a wildlife trip to Colombia (full travel report) I was doing some general searching around Colombian birds when I stumbled upon the All Birds Colombia app.

I hadn’t heard about it before, and it seems to be the only app to focus fully on birds in Colombia. The € 27,99 price point seemed a little steep to me, but with our trip starting the next day, I took the gamble. Plus, on a total budget of a remote wildlife trip, this is peanuts.

Here’s a quick writeup on the working on this app, and my opinion on it.

Do you need this app at all?

This app directly competes with the standard birding book in Colombia: Field guide to the Birds of Colombia. I own that book, but you don’t even need to, because every guide in Colombia will have it with them.

The reason one may still opt for a physical field guide over an app is their reliability. A book always works and needs no electricity or connection. Electricity, however, is not a problem in Colombia. We’ve visited Colombia twice including remote areas, and it’s always available. Even in the unlikely situation where you cannot charge your smartphone, even a cheap power bank gives you 4 full charges nowadays.

Since this app works fully offline, it is viable competition for the field guide. Let’s do a quick round up of its functionality to see how it competes.

Note: this app is over 3GB in size, be sure to download it before going on your trip!

Category browsing

From the app’s home screen, you can browse the giant collection of bird species using meaningful categories:

This is very beginner-friendly. If you’re not a hardcore birder, you may struggle with finding the proper family, but not using these categories. They have easy to understand names. More importantly, the group illustrations are really strong, if you’re a more visual person.

You can change the display mode to set it to a list or a text-only representation. Furthermore, from the app’s settings, you can change the species title to be displayed in english, latin, or spanish. In particular spanish is useful, as often local guides may know the bird in spanish only.

Bottom line, category browsing is strong to look up birds, but also to simply discover them by browsing around.

Search

By far the most used feature in the field is search. You or a guide may know a bird’s name or at least a candidate species. The fastest way to get to the species is via search. Another use case is playing the bird’s call on speaker, for which you typically also use search.

Simply put, search works just fine. It’s a fuzzy search where each character typed further reduces the amount of matches. Looking up a species can be done with absolute minimum typing, which is great.

Species info

Whether you browse or search a species, ultimately the quality of the app relies on the quality of the species information.

Although I have not checked all ~2,000 records, the quality of the information in general is excellent. In particular the illustrations are great. They are accurate and typically show the different genders and maturity stages.

This is where the app shines compared to the classic field guide. The field guide is notorious for its poor plates, where some illustrations are way off.

Despite the app scoring well in species info and illustrations, I also sense a missed opportunity for a digital experience. It could have easily included actual photos or videos. There is a real world need for this, we often found our local guides looking up photos on the internet to double check a species’ appearance.

Bird calls

Part of the species information are the birds’ songs. Some species lack a song, others have between 1–3.

The app can be used for song playback, yet please do so in moderation. At some popular birding sites in Colombia, birds are no longer responding to playback due to the overuse (abuse)of it. You can compare it to ringing someone’s doorbell, and then running away. It’s funny the first two times, after that it gets old and nobody will answer the door anymore.

The overuse of playback puts stress on male birds (territorial instincts) and loses its effectiveness over time.

I wish the app would include this ethical warning, instead of promoting it as a default practise. I’m serious about this. Playback negatively impacts both wildlife and other birders.

Comparing species

A powerful feature of the app is to compare species, which you may need if you have multiple candidate species. To use it, hit the compare button and check the candidate species:

Next, hit the double arrows in the bottom. Now you can compare the illustrations, geographic range and calls:

Another way to do comparison is to open a single species record, and then hit the Similar button:

We’ve solved multiple identification puzzles directly in the field this way, it’s a really strong feature.

Sightings

It is possible to directly register your observations in the app, using Sightings:

It does the bare minimum, yet I don’t find it terribly useful. The data seems to live in this container only. There doesn’t seem to be a way to export or share the data beyond this very limited context. It’s a useless data set if a birder visits multiple countries (they tend to do that). Another perhaps more personal problem is that it registers birds only, whilst I’m a naturalist registering species across categories.

Finally, species records do not link with sightings, so there’s no way to tell from general browsing which birds you’ve seen already.

Identify species

A powerful feature is to identify species by filling in some characteristics:

You go into each category, specifically the one you’re sure about, and narrow down the list of possible matches this way. The mechanism is really strong, and I love this feature.

However, it does not work as effectively as I had hoped for. One problem is that characteristics are subjective. For example, what is a “long tail” or “short beak”. There may be a mismatch between my interpretation of that term and the interpretation of the app makers.

As you can continue to set characteristics, you further complicate this issue as you have already accidentally excluded the species you were looking for, or the opposite: to have many false positives. Another complicating factor are genders and immature birds, which may have entirely different characteristics.

As a test, even when knowing the exact species I was searching for, I could not successfully narrow down to it using the Identify feature.

I believe there’s simple solutions for this feature to be improved:

• Category filter. An additional optional filter should be to set the bird’s general category. For example, I may already know it’s a hummingbird, and this would make further characteristics way more meaningful. For example, there’s only 3 hummingbirds with a long tail, yet 300 across all categories.
• Range filter. You know where birds occur, you know where I am currently, connect these two pieces of data as a meaningful starting point to narrow down further identification.

Better yet, imagine combining the above two new filters. It detects my geographic location, and I filter on a single field: category. Almost without effort, I’d now have a manageable set of birds to wade through.

Bottom line

Summing up the pros and cons of this app:

Pros

• Beginner-friendly
• Works fully offline
• Completeness of information
• Accuracy of illustrations
• Multiple language support
• Powerful search
• Powerful compare feature
• Basic observation logging
• Promising identify feature

Cons (and opportunities for improvement)

• Missing ethical warning on use of voice calls
• No voice call detection
• Observation logging lacks ability to export data or to see observations of others
• Species records lack photos and videos
• Identify feature lacks category and geographic range filter

Back to the point of this review: can the app compete with the classic field guide?

A resounding yes. This app is a good replacement of the field guide. It’s actually better. Its information is more complete and accurate, and it can do things a book can’t: search, compare, identify species, listen to songs.

If you’re considering buying the field guide for a first trip to Colombia, my advise is to not buy it. Not only will every guide carry it anyway, this app is better. The ultimate evidence of this is that as our trip progressed, increasingly guides would ask me to open the app to look up something. Simply because it’s faster and more accurate than using the book. Or they wanted to hear the call, which you can’t from a book. That pretty much says it all. Plus, apps work pretty well in the dark, unlike books.

Only if you have a particular book fetish where you wish to collect physical books so that you can look at them decades later, would I get the book instead. Indeed, 10 years from now likely this app is useless. Right now, it is invaluable.

That said, the app is not perfect. In particular, it does not fully exploit all digital possibilities. It’s still too much a digitized book rather than an actual digital experience. Sightings are poorly integrated, species media is not available (photos, video). There’s also plenty of opportunities to improve the Identify feature.

All of those drawbacks are a wish list, as the basic features of this app are worthwhile, and I would recommend this app strongly if you’re going birding in Colombia.