Over the past few years eBird, a project from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, has been making in-roads in the birding community. As a result, many of our users have been asking us why they should use Birder's Diary instead of eBird. To answer this pertinent question, we completed a detailed comparison between the functional capabilities of Birder's Diary v3.7 and eBird as of April, 2011.

This analysis attempts to be honest and fair. If you find that any of this is in error or has changed, please drop us a note at support@birdersdiary.com.

Birder's Diary - Keeping track of your observations

Birder's Diary was developed for the avid birder and naturalist to maintain detailed records of their sightings. Using Birder's Diary, you can capture unlimited user-defined data about each sighting and then report on this data in a myriad of ways. You can print checklists; automatically maintain life list counts for any region on Earth; recall and report on trends; etc, etc. A unique feature of Birder's Diary is that you can keep track of non-avian sightings as well. Checklists exist for mammals, butterflies, trees, and many more.

eBird - Gathering data for science

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is a highly respected academic organization that has embarked on developing and providing a web-based tool, eBird, which allows the users to record their sightings and provide data to the at-large scientific community. In return, eBird provides its users with reports on their sightings, basic status reports, life list totals, and rankings compared to other eBird users. This is a very worthwhile scientific endeavor aimed at gathering observational data for a greater in-depth understand of our dynamic avian world.

Is it right for you?

However, is it for the birding demographic? Aimed at meeting your needs or the data-gathering needs of an academic and scientific project?

The down side to this for the individual birder is, among other things, the following:

• Your data is not kept on your machine; but rather at Cornell's site.
• An internet connection is required to access your data.
• You are unable to link your observations with user specific information such a photos, sketches, etc.
• You need to keep track of how you birded (protocol, starting time, duration, ....)
• Often overlooked - Some birders simply do not like the internet or have difficulties using it.
• In this day of funding budget cuts, what happens if/when this project no longer becomes necessary, appropriate or in-vogue for Cornell? Where is your data then? Or the tools to use that data? Funding this project for Cornell is more than just doing some initial programming to get the web application online for gathering your data; they have to continue to support a large data farm of servers and storage.
• Does Cornell listen to its users for feature enhancements of wanted functionality? Their goal is to acquire data from a world-wide user base; and in as much as they can satisfy that, they have no real impetus to go further. They are a very qualified staff and downright nice folks. But the academic world is not driven by customer loyalty, but rather to the currently funded project, thesis or doctoral program.

Data Exchange

Birder's Diary has the capability (since v3.6 and compatible with other 3.x versions) to upload your sightings to Cornell's eBird if you wish, thereby contributing to the worthwhile goal of providing scientific data to the Ornithological community. But your data stays with you, on as many computers as you like and the functionality will never go away! We have been here since 1995 and will be for another 16 years and more.

What other users say?

Many users prefer to use Birder's Diary to enter sightings for a varierty of reasons before uploading the records to eBird. Why?

• You never see birds in the taxonomic order in the field and thus birds are recorded in the field note book in the order they have been seen. Using the keyboard entry in Birder's Diary and a combination of banding codes and common names users quickly enter their observations.
• Users like to keep track of count estimates (low-high) of the number of birds seen on the computer for reporting purposes.
• Users take photos and link the best photo(s) of the bird to the observation.
• Often users do not keep track of "how long did you bird" so the protocol defaults to " incidental/casual", which is not very useful information.
• Users like to be able to quickly generate a trip report and post this on the local list server. Being able to quickly combine mulitple stops into a single report is very valuable, not only as a trip leader but also for the participants".

Functional comparison of Birder's Diary and eBird

The table below provides a detailed functional comparison between Birder's Diary 3.7 and eBird.