Local-first · Free & open source
SnowRaven reads your eBird and Macaulay Library exports and gives you weather and tides for your checklists, your history with every species, life-list statistics and an interactive map. It runs on your own device.
Privacy by design
SnowRaven has no account, no analytics, no telemetry, and no server we run. Your eBird backup, Macaulay Library export, and API keys are stored only on your device unless you turn on iCloud syncing between your devices, and anything you sync goes to your own iCloud account and nowhere else.
What's inside
Built on your eBird and Macaulay Library exports.
Paste an eBird checklist ID and get a weather and tide summary ready to drop into the checklist comment, or look up the conditions where you are now, or the forecast for any place and time ahead. The Weather/tide Planner lays out the coming sunrises and sunsets, each with its tide and forecast weather.
A dashboard built from your eBird backup: life-list totals and growth, milestones, and when and where you bird. A weather section reads back the weather blocks SnowRaven and RainCrow write into checklist comments: the conditions on the outings you wrote a block for.
Dark mode shown.
Your sightings on an interactive map, with nearby eBird hotspots and where species new to you were reported recently. Counties shade by your counts or by how complete your county list is, with a California Breeding Bird Atlas overlay.
Your whole history with one bird: sightings, field notes, breeding codes, a map of every observation, and any splits or lumps along the way. A weather card shows the skies and temperatures you found it in, from SnowRaven and RainCrow weather blocks.
A year of your birding as twelve month grids, each day shaded by how many species you saw. Fold the years together, or narrow it to a single species.
Your life list as a media checklist: which species you have photographed, recorded, and filmed, and which you still need. Narrow it by sex and age.
Every species you have recorded breeding evidence for, as a matrix against eBird's breeding codes, colored by evidence tier.
Your checklists as whole outings: search every comment you have written, and filter by what an outing has.
Two life lists side by side, or any two public checklists: what they share and what only one has.
Tag an individual bird by name in a species comment and SnowRaven gathers everything you have on it: sightings, places, a timeline, its own media. With several named birds, one strip puts them all on a shared time axis.
Runs where you do
A native app for Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, and Android, or self-hosted on a Raspberry Pi (or any computer on your network) and opened from any browser. One universal Mac build covers Apple Silicon and Intel, and the self-hosted version works in a phone or tablet browser too.
Get started
Download the universal .dmg from the latest release, drag SnowRaven to Applications, then right-click the app and choose Open on first launch.
Get SnowRaven from the App Store. It is free and runs on iOS 16 or later. Updates arrive through the App Store like any other app.
Download for iPhone and iPadGet SnowRaven from F-Droid. It is free and runs on Android 8.0 or later. Updates arrive through the F-Droid app.
Download for AndroidDownload the .exe installer and run it. SmartScreen may warn about an unknown publisher, so choose More info, then Run anyway. In-app updates are cryptographically verified.
Run one command on your Pi (or any Debian or Ubuntu machine). It handles packages, the build, the Python environment, and an optional auto-start service.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dtgibson/snowraven/main/install.sh | bash
SnowRaven is free and open source, built by one birder for their own data.