Birding analytics and tools for your eBird workflow

Species Detail

Your complete history with any species. Sighting stats, breeding codes, the species you most often see it with, field notes, top locations (public eBird hotspots link to their hotspot page, wherever a location name appears in the app), sightings-over-time graphs, a map of every observation, and your Macaulay Library media, all in one view.

Calendar

A year of your birding as twelve month grids, like a wall calendar's twelve pages, each day carrying a number — the species you saw, the checklists you submitted, or the total count of individual birds you recorded, your choice. Each day is shaded by how busy it was, so the shape of your year reads at a glance: busy migration weeks, quiet mid-summer, a big count-day spike. Type-to-find a single species to see the seasonal shape of when you record it, page across every year your data covers or fold them all into one combined grid, switch between the big month grids and a whole-year overview of shaded, dated thumbnails, turn on a colorblind-friendly texture mode, and click any day for its checklists — each with its start time, location, and species count.

Map Explorer

An interactive map of your sightings with an optional heatmap, nearby eBird hotspots colored by whether you've visited them, media targets, and a California Breeding Bird Atlas overlay. Optional county lines draw US county boundaries over the current view, kept crisp and accurate at every zoom because they come straight from the map's own tiles, and can shade each county by how many species (or checklists) you've recorded there, drawn from your own loaded backup, with a legend, a popup per county, and a keyboard-accessible list of the counties in view. A third Completeness metric shades each county by how complete your county list is — your countable species there measured against everything ever reported to eBird for that county, on a fixed 0–100% scale — with a per-county progress bar, your newest county species, and a short list of targets you haven't recorded there yet. That one metric needs a connection and your own eBird API key (the app says so right at the control); lookups stay bounded to the counties you've birded in view and are cached on your device for 30 days, so fetched counties keep shading offline. An optional colorblind-friendly Use Textures mode paints each county as a crosshatch whose density rises with your count, so you can rank counties without relying on color. Only one of the atlas or county shadings is active at a time, and while a shading ramp is on the basemap's land mutes to grey so the ramp stands out. A Point Size control lets you shrink or hide the sighting points so a shaded map reads through underneath. A Nearby Lifers section maps where species you haven't recorded yet were reported recently near a point you choose, each spot a labeled pin colored by how recently it was seen, with dates and checklist links a click away. Nearby Lifers and Media Targets each carry a locator dot at their exact coordinate and a Labels / Dots toggle, so you can collapse the marker chips to clean dots for an overview of where the birds are. Set a time range and radius, search a place name, use your location, or right-click the map (long-press on touch) to drop a pin and search from there. Switch between street, satellite, and topo basemaps, with a hiking-trails layer.

Breeding Codes

Every species you've recorded a breeding code for, laid out as a color-coded matrix across all eBird codes. Sort and filter by tier to see exactly where your breeding evidence stands. On a phone the columns tighten to dot-width so more fit at once, and you can pinch to zoom in on any part of the grid.

Checklists

Your checklists as whole outings. Search every checklist comment and every species comment you've ever written, and browse a filterable list of all your checklists — combine has and doesn't-have filters for comments, media, breeding codes, completeness, protocol, county, and dates. Pasted weather and tide blocks stay hidden (and out of search) until you ask for them.

Offline support

Out in the field with no signal, SnowRaven keeps working from the data already loaded on your device. The maps and every analytical tab open offline once they've loaded online once — your sightings, heatmap, atlas, labels, and taxonomically sorted names with their icons all draw, even on a first cold start of the day. A checklist's weather and tide you looked up earlier re-show, marked as the last loaded result.

On the desktop app you can opt in to downloading offline map regions: while you have a connection, save the counties you bird (or whole states), then pan and zoom them later with full street detail. A manager shows each region's size, a running total, flags ones that are out of date, and lets you remove them. It's off by default.

SnowRaven is honest about the edges. Live lookups — current weather and tide, place search, the Checklist Comparer, nearby-bird overlays, and app updates — still need a connection; offline you see the last loaded result where one exists, or a plain note that you're offline. Only the vector street basemap works offline; satellite, topo, and trails need a connection.