Local-first · Free & open source
SnowRaven takes your eBird and Macaulay Library records and lets you explore them in new ways. Weather and tides for your checklists, deep per-species history, life-list analytics, media coverage, breeding records, and an interactive map. It uses your own exported data, on your own device, so you stay in control.
Privacy by design
SnowRaven has no account, no analytics, no telemetry, and no server we operate. Your eBird backup, Macaulay Library export, settings, and API keys never leave your computer. When you ask for data, it talks directly to the services it draws from: eBird and OpenWeather with your own keys, plus keyless sources like OpenStreetMap, map tiles, and NOAA tides. There is no SnowRaven server in the middle.
What's inside
Everything reads from the eBird and Macaulay Library exports you already have. No data entry, no busywork.
Paste an eBird checklist ID and get a clean, ready-to-paste weather summary: temperature, wind with its Beaufort description, humidity, dew point, and sunrise and sunset. The same lookup fills in the historical tide from the nearest NOAA station, observed or predicted, with the surrounding highs and lows. Copy weather and tide together in one click.
Your complete history with any species. Sighting stats, breeding codes, the species you most often see it with, field notes, top locations, sightings-over-time graphs, a map of every observation, and your Macaulay Library media, all in one view.
A full analytics dashboard built from your own data: life-list totals and growth, top species, firsts and milestones, temporal and geographic patterns, effort and methodology, data quality, breeding stats, and media trends.
Light or dark, your choice. Dark mode shown.
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. Switch between street, satellite, and topo basemaps, with a hiking-trails layer.
Your life list as a media checklist: photo, audio, and video coverage for every species, so you can see at a glance what you still need to capture, with filters and links straight to your Macaulay Library.
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.
Compare two life lists to see shared and unique species, or compare two individual checklists side by side: counts with the higher total emphasized, breeding codes, photo, audio, and video indicators, effort details, and checklist and species comments.
Runs where you do
Install the native desktop app on a Mac or Windows PC, or self-host it on a Raspberry Pi (or any computer on your network) and open it from any browser. One universal Mac build runs on both Apple Silicon and Intel, and the whole interface is responsive, so it works on a phone or tablet 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.
Download 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 began as a tool for one birder's own data, and it's shared here, open source and free, in case other birders find it useful. It works alongside eBird and the Macaulay Library, building on the exports they let you download so you can look at your own observations from new angles. There's nothing to sign up for, and nothing to buy.