iBird Pro Guide to Birds app review: the App Store's most comprehensive and functional birding app 2021

Introduction

iBird Pro Guide to Birds is one of the leading birds apps for the iPhone and iPad, designed to identify any bird species within North America like any expert ornithologist.

Featured on the likes of O'Reilly, 148apps.com, Scientific American Magazine, Macworld, and many more, this iPhone birds app has won several awards and received many nominations, validating the hard work and effort put in my the developers, the Mitch Waite Group.

This top birds app for iPhone costs a whopping $29.99, but has been temporarily reduced to $19.99. At such an extravagant price, what does this app have to offer? Let's find out as we dive deeper in our iBird Pro Guide to Birds app review.

The best iPhone apps for great outdoors-2021

Say Goodbye To Clunky Field Guides

iBird Pro Guide to Birds will single-handedly replace the giant tomes that are most field guides, and compress all the information into one database on your iOS device. This will allow you to carry it around with ease and never have to flip through pages and pages to identify the avian creature before you.

All the identification and information is downloaded onto your device, occupying a massive 674 MB, but for ornithologists with a passion, that is a small sacrifice to make because it means that an Internet connection is not required to access the information or use any of the features, making this a fully self-contained app that can be used in the remotest of locations.

The best iPhone apps for great outdoors-2021

Search & Save

One thing I love about the development team of iBird Pro Guide to Birds is that they are constantly updating the app, be it the database, which currently stands at 938 species alighted with the AOU and ABA standards, or the user experience optimization, such as providing iPhone 5 screen support to fully use the bigger screen.

Allowing you to search by parameter, this app features 38 attributes that you can use to search for your bird, allowing you to find the right one faster than ever. You can search by color, shape, song, location, head & body patterns, flight style, and much more.

If you are a novice, don't worry, there is a tutorial to help you understand the terms and to teach you how to use the search function.

There are also over five hours total of bird songs and calls from the world-famous Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, comprising of 154 more species songs than any other bird app on the App Store.

You will also get access to the Spectrographic display which will help you understand the structure of bird songs by showing you their frequency components.

Searches can be saved, loaded, named, and edited at your will so you can use the same search parameters when necessary, only changing a couple of details if necessary.

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Pros & Cons

Pros

• Replace your field guides with one portable app
• Get access to 938 species across North America
• Experience the features optimized for each iOS device
• Use this app in the remotest of locations even without an Internet connection

Cons

• Very expensive but probably cheaper than a bird book, with more features

Final Words

iBird Pro Guide to Birds may be an expensive app, but it is far cheaper than buying field guides that are clunky and impractical to carry around.

This app is sure to fulfill all your ornithological needs all from the comfort and portability of your iPhone or iPad. I would definitely recommend this app to all birding hobbyists and professionals alike.