6,400 Photos - 2,420 Species - 140 Great Photographers!!

Thanks to all of you who contributed to make the contest a great success and to help us deliver a great new app. BirdsEye will now be able to display photos for 2,404 of the roughly 10,000 living species of birds in the world! We now can provide almost complete coverage for North America and Australia and over 75% for Japan!

We have a lot of gaps to fill in the rest of the world, so our challenge for the rest of the year is to build up Africa, SE Asia and South America.

Special thanks to friends at Eagle Optics donating the Zeiss and Eagle Optics binoculars for the First and Second Prizes. And to Lifeproof Cases for their contribution of the rugged all-weather iPhone cases!

And the Winners Are....

• First Prize: Zeiss 8x42 Conquest HD Binoculars - Congratulations to John Hoyt!!

• Second Prize:  Eagle Optics Ranger 8x42 Binocular - Congratulations to Bill Adams!

The contest drawing was run using Random.org, which provides fair and transparent drawings.  If you are one of the photographers who participated, you can follow the link, enter your email address and it will confirm your participation and results.  Pretty cool!

Regional Winners (based on Facebook Likes)

Many thanks to Eagle Optics and LifeProof for sponsoring the great prizes and enticing so many of you to enter the contest.

Contest Rules

Additional Photo Submissions

Several people have asked and the answer is Yes!  We are still accepting photos at our Photo Submission page, although they will not count for the contest.  However, we will include all submissions in our next contest and the offer of a free app for everyone who submits a photo still stands!   We are especially interested in receiving photos from South America, Asia, Africa and Europe.  For a list of species still missing, please down-load the Photosneeded file from Dropbox.

BirdsEye Photo Contest Contributors

Here are the contributor status ranked from the most photos submitted.  You can find bios on several of the photographers on the Top Contributors page.

Article Permalink: http://www.birdseyebirding.com/index.php/blog/128-photo-contest2

Tips and Tricks: Getting the Most from Your iPhone and Android Batteries

I'll bet that most of you find at least one trick below that you did not know about before.   Everything below is written from the perspective of birding, but actually all of these tips are applicable to almost any iPhone or Android users.

First, a note: We've designed BirdLog to be a as low-impact as possible as far as battery life is concerned.  In tests, we find that it consumes less battery than most other apps on our phones.  We've tried to minimize activities that use a lot of power, such as internet connections and fetching GPS locations.  If you are seeing significant shortening of your battery life, chances are that something else is going on.

Getting the most from your battery can be a big deal when you're out birding all day.  Here are some tips, all of which apply to both Android and iPhone.

1) Turn down the brightness of your screen:  This is perhaps the biggest and simplest thing you can do to increase battery life.  On my phone, the screen looks bright, beautiful and wonderfully easy to read.  It's great … except that it kills battery life!  On my phone, the difference between battery life at full brightness and the lowest level I can tolerate is about 4 hours!  I'm not saying that you should turn your brightness down, just that you should be aware that this is a tool at your disposal to extend battery life when you need it. 

2) Shut down or restart background programs: You would think that unused programs running in the background would not consume much power.  You'd be wrong!  On my iPhone, there are a couple of really bad offenders, the worst of which, oddly, is my Sudoku program.  Leaving it running in the background can reduce my battery life by HALF!  That's right, 3 hours or so.  Ouch.   

There are two approaches you can take here -  turn everything non-essential off, or get an app that monitors battery usage and gives you advice. On iPhone, a good free option is called Carat.  On Android, I've used two free apps,  Battery Monitor Widget and GSam Battery Monitor and they both worked great.  You may be suprised by the results you get, I know I was.

3) Restart background apps: If you don't want to shut down an app, such as the phone when you want to receive calls, you can try restarting it.  Often this trick will cause apps to consume less power.   In some cases restarting an app makes no noticable difference in battery drain, but sometimes it can make a huge difference.

For example my text message app sometimes goes haywire and starts consuming a bunch of power.  Several times a month it gets bad enough that Messenger alone reduces my battery life by 1 to 2 hours, according to Carat!   If I restart Messenger, it goes back to consuming almost no battery.   

4) Get an extended battery pack.  I think this solution falls into the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" category of advice.  There are simply times when no amount of battery saving will get the job done.  For example, I've gone on 2-day hikes when I want to be able to use my phone to record bird sightings.  

This job isn't going to get done by conserving battery alone unless you're willing to simply turn your phone off for most of your trip.  

Here are some links to some good products sold by Amazon that can help:

Battery Packs
  for iPhone and Android

Solar Power Chargers for iPhone and Android

5) Be aware of the types of processes that consume a lot of power and minimize them.  Most people know that using the phone uses a lot of power, but do you know that using GPS consumes almost as much power as the phone? Or that playing sounds can be a huge battery hog?  it's true.  I find that if I pay attention to how fast the battery drops, it helps me use the battery hogging functions less.  

Both iPhone and Android support a percent display for the battery.  I find that displaying the percentage rather than just a 4-bar battery icon is really helpful for tracking usage and getting to know the power hogs on my phone. 

6) Put your phone to sleep before putting it in your pocket: This simple trick can be quite effective: I've found that many people don't put their phones to sleep before putting them back in their pockets.  If you're one of these people, try to get into the habit of hitting your sleep / power button before returning it to your pocket.

7) Put your phone in Airplane mode.  I sometimes find myself in situations in which all of the above tricks are still not enough.  When this happens I'll either turn my phone off or put it in Airplane mode.  I'll switch it back for a few seconds to start or submit a checklist, check email or send a text message, but then put it back into Airplane mode.  

8) Get charged when you can.  Again, using percentage mode is really helpful in learning how fast your phone charges.  I find that even short charges can extend my battery life quite considerably.  For example, if I have a five-minute drive between birding spots, I can sometimes add 5 or even more percent to my battery, which is enough to give me and extra 20 minutes of battery life.

9) Optimize your phone's settings to reduce battery consumption.  Besides the biggie mentioned above, screen brightness, here are some other items to check:
-- turn off background downloading of email away from wifi and set the max size of email downloads to something small, like 25 or 50 kilobytes.
-- look for apps that have location services turned on and turn off this feature for those apps that don't really need it for your purposes
-- turn off automatic background syncing for various apps: Mail, Calendar, Facebook and Contacts for example.  Note that this means that you'll need to remember to sync them manually, or set them to sync when you open them.
-- turn off push notifications for apps where you don't really need them.

10) If none of the tricks above seem to help, and you have chronically short battery life, it's possible that there is a problem with your phone or you battery.  You can perform a google search for "replace iPhone battery" or "Android battery replacement" to explore your options.  Most phone stores with service departments will be able to quickly test your phone and let you know if you need a replacement.

BirdLog & the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) February 15-18

We are proud to announce that BirdLog has been chosen as the GBBC app of choice by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Our mission is to promote the accurate and frequent use of eBird, and eBird and GBBC are merging this year, so we are proud to support the 2013 Great Backyard Bird Count.  We hope BirdLog ease of use will attract even more birders and provide more high quality data for the GBBC!

BirdLog makes it easy to pinpoint your location automatically, capture sightings, and submit them to GBBC  while in the field.  If you already use BirdLog, there's nothing new to learn, nor any special steps to take to participate using BirdLog.  Just submit your checklists as usual and your data will be automatically captured when submitted to eBird from BirdLog.

The GBBC marks its 16th year as a free citizen-science program that surveys birds in backyards, national parks, gardens, wetlands and urban landscapes.  A joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Audubon, with Canadian partner Bird Studies Canada, the four-day count typically receives sightings from tens of thousands of people reporting more than 600 bird species in the United States and Canada alone.

The GBBC is being integrated with eBird, a real-time, global online checklist program launched by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Audubon in 2002. eBird now takes in millions of bird observations every month.

Our mission at Birds in the Hand is to help drive bird conservation through support of projects like GBBC and eBird.

Article Permalink: http://www.birdseyebirding.com/index.php/blog/121-gbbc-blog-post-2

 eBird and Conservation

I am often asked "Why should I enter my data into eBird?"   Today's post outlines my answer to that question and also talks about why eBird is so important to me personally that I've devoted years of my life to promoting it's use.

Why does eBird matter?  Every birder might have a different answer to this question.  For some it might be "to help me track my life list", "to create a permanent record of my sightings" or "to let my friends know about rarities in our area."  I agree that those benefits are important, but I think they are just the perks we get for doing something even more important: supporting long-term conservation of birds and other species worldwide by entering data into eBird.

The connection between entering data into eBird and saving species may seem tenuous at first glance, but it is in fact far more direct and powerful than first meets the eye.  This connection is what orginally motivated us to create BirdsEye and BirdLog. BirdsEye is designed to make eBird data meaningful and accessible to birders on a daily basis; and BirdLog is designed to making entering eBird data easier, especially in remote locations far from desktop computers.

There are many different reasons to capture bird data, and in my post below I focus on preserving biodiversity, especially in the tropics, but these same ideas apply just as well to your local patch anywhere in the world.  Your data helps us learn about population changes over time, understand subtleties of status and distribution and migration timing changes related to climate change.

Background

Over the course of the next few decades, scientists estimate that a large fraction (20-50% by some estimates) of the earth's biodiversity is at risk and the biggest factors are climate change and habitat conversion in the tropics.  Just to be clear, "habitat conversion" means habitat loss as forests are converted to pasture and agriculture.  

Conservation organizations and scientists need to understand what areas are the highest priorities for protection, and eBird data is among the best sources for the information needed to answer this question.

Large-scale habitat conversion has been widespread for hundreds of years in temperate regions. What's different in the tropics, however, is the scale of the potential loss of species.  Species that live in tropics are much more vulnerable because the tropics represent just a small fraction of the surface area of the earth and are where a disproportionate share of the world's species live.  For example, tropical rainforest represents just about 6.5% of the land area of the earth but supports around 50% of the earth's species of plants, animals and birds.  

Unless you have visited a tropical rain forest, it might be difficult to imagine a place where the number of birds is 10x or 100x higher than what you are used to seeing at home in the US.  Consider Panama as an example: the number of native species of trees in one square mile of Panamanian rain forest is similar to the total number of native tree species in all of North America.  Similarly, the number of birds in Panama list is almost 1000, which is roughly the same or a bit higher than the number of birds found in the entire ABA area!  Species diversities farther south are even higher.  Columbia, for example, has almost 1,900 species of birds on it's official list.  In these areas, experienced birders can find over 250 species in a day of birding in a relatively small area.

Many bird species from temperate regions rely on the tropics for their wintering grounds, so protecting habitat in the tropics not only helps tropical endemics, but also helps protect these migrants including Scarlet Tanagers, Gray-cheecked Thrushes and Black-billed Cuckoos.

The point of all of this is that protecting key areas of tropical forest is the single most valuable thing we can do to protect a large number of species that might otherwise go extinct.  

What do scientists do with eBird data?

This is where eBird data comes in.  In order for conservation organizations to make fast, accurate decisions about how and where to focus their scarce resources, they need data about the distribution of biodiversity.  In order to determine which land to save, they need to know the answers to three key questions: 

  -- Biodiversity: Which areas have the most species diversity?

  -- Endemism: Which areas have the most species found nowhere else?

  -- Range: What areas are critical to the survival of an individual species?

The data required to answer these questions comes from boots on the ground, not from satellites or remote sensing stations.  It comes from people recording what they see and hear, and putting those data into databases accessible to scientists, like eBird.

The fastest way to quickly estimate the biodiverstiy and level of endemism is to record the bird species present in an area because it is much easier to perform a reasonably complete and data-rich survey of birds in just a few hours than it is for plants, insects, reptiles or mammals.  There are also many more people who can identify birds than there are for other groups.  It turns out that if you know how many birds use a patch of native forest, you can do a good job of estimating how many species of plants, insects and other life occur there as well, which makes sense when you consider that the number of bird species present is a reflection of the number of ecological niches available for them to utilize.  Similarly, the ranges of bird species can be used to predict the ranges of other plants and animals.

How can you help?

So ... on your next trip to your local park, your back yard or a tour to the Amazon, consider the value of your bird data for future generations.  We estimate that today less than 2% of all high-quality bird observations worldwide are end up in a database for use by future scientists and conservation organizations.  Many end up in notebooks or personal life-list tracking software, but we need for these data to end up in eBird.  

Recording a checklist from a quick stop along a road in the Amazon could end up being one of the few records of what birds lived in THAT SPOT before it was converted to agriculture in the next 5 or 10 years.  Imperfect and incomplete as might feel your checklist is, it is valuable!

Here are some tips to make your eBird data as valuable as possible:

1) it is better to collect and report your data than not, so feel free to ignore the rest of the rules if they mean that you won't enter your data!

2) Try to record and report all of the species present to the best of your abilility, not just the rarities.  When possible, try to record approximate numbers for each species, even if they are just rough estimates.  I know that a lot of birders are intimidated by attempting to provide counts because they feel that counting is too difficult.  Here's a rule of thumb: if you think you can provide an estimate of numbers that is accurate to within about a factor of 3, then your data is valuable and it is better to enter a number.  You can think of your options in terms of the following options: 0, 1, a few (5), a dozen (12), etc.  Exact counts are great but are not necessary to give scientists the information they need.

3) it is better to create a bunch of short checklist for specific locations, rather than a single long list that covers a large area.  As a general guideline, shoot for data that is within about a 5 mile area as a maximum.  When you drive more than 5 miles, it is time to start a new list.

4) Make sure the date and location for your data is as accurate as possible. Much of your effort above to capture good data goes to waste if you enter it for the wrong location!  When possible, either associate your sightings with an eBird Hotspot, a personal location, or use GPS to record the exact spot.  

5) The most important contribution you can make is from areas with little or no current data.  BirdLog is designed to make the task of entering eBird data easier when you are far from your desktop computer ... such as on a two-week trip to Peru.  We encourage you to find those black spots on the map and help fill them in with good data.

I know it sounds sappy, but it's true: Future generations will appreciate the data we are collecting today long after we are gone.  Thank you!!

Click here to learn more about how you can help us promote eBird.

Article Permalink: http://www.birdseyebirding.com/index.php/blog/106-ebird-and-conservation

Year of the Android? 

At this point we have a total of 10 apps for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, 6 for Google/Android and we have 2 in the Amazon store.  I've been thinking about this a lot:

Will 2013 be the year of the Android?

A question we hear all the time from our users is "What are your plans for Android?"  Each year I keep thinking "This is the year Android makes good".  Each year comes and goes and still the Android market isn't ready yet.  Is 2013 the year?  I don't know, but there are some signs to suggest that maybe it is ... or maybe there never will be a year of the Android and 2013 will be the year that Windows 8 starts making waves.  

Just to be clear: Android phones are selling like crazy, but that's not what this article is about.  I'm focusing here on the market for Android apps, which until now has lagged far behind the iOS market.  Pundits keep telling us that a huge surge of Android App sales is coming ... real soon!  That's great, but as a developer, I'm interested in current conditions, and right now the weather isn't fine on planet Android, at least not in the US.

I imagine that many of the people who are going to read this blog post are die-hard Android fans (as am I) who at this point are beginning to become irate.  Bear with me and read on.  But be warned: you may not like the unvarnished truth from my perspective as a developer about the Android platform!

Let me start by saying that I am an Android user, so I'm not biased against the platform.  In the last 10 years I have used Android, iPhone and Blackberry as my primary phone.  Last year I used an Android (HTC Thunderbolt) phone only.  This year I use an iPhone as my primary phone but also have my Android as my secondary phone.  I tend to use whatever phone I'm focusing on the most from a development standpoint.  There are things I like better about each platform, but overall I like both a lot … and sometimes I even miss the simplicity and ease of use of my old Blackberry!

It's interesting about Android.  Everywhere I look I see signs of a huge market.  There are roughly twice as many Android smartphones out there as there are iPhones and that trend seems to be accelerating.  Samsung sales are through the roof and there are many more Android users than there are iOS users.  

And there are some positive signs from Android users.  For example, users of our BirdLog app for Android enter about 2x as many checklists per person per month as the average iOS user.  That's strange, right?  My theory is that the Android users tend more towards the young, cash-strapped, tech-savvy birders who are out there every day, including a large fraction of the professional biologists.

So … what's the problem?  

Well, there are several:

There are major differences between the iOS and Android user bases in terms of app buying habits, demographics and psychology.  Compared to iOS users, Android users tend to be younger, lower income (mostly because they are younger), more tech-savvy and more price conscious comparison shoppers.  They like apps and they use apps … but they don't like to PAY for apps.  They are much more willing to accept poorer quality and watch ads (which is how Google makes money, after all) than iOS users in order to save money.

In our case, the demographics of our user base don't favor Android.  The Android demographics described above are not the demographics of the typical birder, which is our target niche.   As a point of reference, there is a Facebook page for birding apps (https://www.facebook.com/groups/351866994920401/?fref=ts) that ran a survey and the last time I checked found that about 65-70% of members were on iOS (and virtually none yet for Windows 8).  

Android users buy fewer apps than iOS user ... MANY fewer apps.  Despite a much larger number of devices, the Android market is just 1/4 the size of the iOS App Market (see: http://www.forbes.com/sites/darcytravlos/2012/08/22/five-reasons-why-google-android-versus-apple-ios-market-share-numbers-dont-matter/).  And you can ignore all the hype about the Amazon app store being bigger than Android … it's true, kind of, but those sales are mostly non-app sales like books, movies and music, so they don't help an app developer.   Here's a startling statistic: the global market for apps on iPad alone is bigger than the entire Android app market, including Kindle. 

The bottom line is that we see pretty much what other developers see: about $0.25 of Android sales for every $1.00 of iOS sales.  More importantly that 25% ratio has been steady for the last year, so it is hard to argue that some kind of seismic shift is occurring, at least not in the US.  I hear similar stories from other app developers.   We see no indication that Android app sales are growing faster than Apple, despite faster sales of devices.  Windows 8 mobile app sales, on the other hand, are growing much faster than either Android or iOS, albeit from a very low base.

So far, it seems that the primary path to make real money with an Android app is with high-volume free apps that are supported by ad revenue, perhaps with an up-sell option to make the ads go away.  That approach works fine if you want to produce apps that target the mass market, like sports, games and news, but this model is tough to make work with high-end or niche apps ... which is a big reason why there isn't the richness of high-quality niche apps available for Android that there is for iOS.

So, what do we plan to do?  

The first thing to remember is that making money on an iOS app is tough.  People throw around the estimate that less than 5% (and some say less than 1%) of iOS app developers make money, and that seems about right to me.  Think about this stat before you consider writing an app: out of every 20 apps that someone writes and publishes in the app store, 19 don't sell enough to earn back the development costs, never mind make money.  The fact that it is even tougher on Android is problematic.

We are lucky to be (just barely) in that top 5%.  In our case the only reason we are in this market in the first place is that we are crazy birders ourselves, so we are willing to lose money or barely scrape by for years in order to do what we love.  (If you are a crazy birder you are welcome to join us!)

Given the facts above, our first priority has to be development for iPhone.  Next comes iPad.  Finally comes Android, although I have doubts that maybe Windows 8 should come before Android given it's growth and appeal to more affluent customers.

The Economics of Developing an Android App

Here is a little more detail on the economics of app development for Android versus iOS.  It makes ugly reading:

1) Porting an app from iOS to Android costs about the same amount as developing an Android app from scratch.  The cost is a bit higher for the same work on an iOS app because there are so many different versions of the Android OS out there, running on so many different devices.  Apple makes things much simpler with a limited number of OS versions and devices to support.  (Note: The so-called platform-independent development environments don't work well enough, which is why they are not widely used, at least not for popular apps.)

2) With the paid app revenue model, one can expect to earn just 20-25% as much revenue as we would for iOS for the same app.  Unless there is a strong back-end of ad or upsell revenue, then you need to expect most Android customers are going to shun paid apps, and most will choose the cheapest option when they do need to pay.

3) Upgrade and maintenance costs are 10-20% higher per unit for Android than for iOS, again because of the wide range of new devices hitting the market every month.  Unlike Apple, Google is much less aggressive about forcing users to upgrade their OS, so there are lots of old OSs out there at the same time that the newest OS keeps changing.  What that means is that our development is harder because we need to build an app that will work on both new and old OSs.  With iOS we pretty much just need to deal with 2 versions of the OS and 3 different screen sizes, and Apple makes that optional by allowing iPhone apps to run on the other form factors.  When a new device or OS comes out, we get about 6 months advance notice.  On Android, by contrast, the form factors and features are all over in terms of screen size, GPS capabilities, slide-out keyboards, etc and apps that display well on one might not work at all on another and change every day.

Here's a hypothetical example of the costs and benefits of creating a complex app, comparable to BirdLog or BirdsEye.  Of course the cost and revenue numbers are made up, but are in line with our experience:

So ... What should I do?

1) Android sales are distributed very non-uniformly by country and by niche within countries.  We discussed how Android is under-represented among birders above.  Another example is that Android represents something like 75% of the smartphone market in China, so if you want to launch an app there it better be on an Android platform. The lesson is to pay attentioin to Android penetration and growth in your target market and ignore the overall figures.

2) Making money with apps is hard in general, and harder with Android.  That said, if you can make a strong case for how you will make money from something other than selling apps (freemium, in-app purchases, ads, upsells, subscriptions, cross-marketing, etc), then go for it.

3) Don't assume that porting your iOS app to Android will produce similar results.  You should plan for much lower sales at the same price point, and consider a different revenue model for Android more suited to that market.

Q&A:

Q: Do you plan to continue developing for Android?  I'm not sure.  Economically, I would say no, but we are also driven by our Mission, which is to support bird conservation through the eBird project.  The Android versions of BirdLog really supports that Mission, especially outside of the US.  So, yeah, we will probably continue to develop for Android, but I think I would try to make our Android apps simpler, lower priced and launch them with different revenue models than for iOS.  I'm waiting to see what happens with Windows 8.  If growth looks strong, we may choose to focus there instead or in addition to Android.

Q: What if you spent more on marketing?  A: In our case, the market for serious birders is limited, so spending more to reach it doesn't make sense to me.  For other apps, a large and thoughtful marketing campaign could help a lot.  If you know of smart ways to reach some new market at lower cost that I'm not thinking about, let me know!

Q: How can I help?  A: Well, anything you can do to help us increase our sales, such as telling your friends helps.  If you'd like to make a targeted contribution to help us create an Android version of BirdsEye or add a specific feature to BirdLog that you care about, that would be fantastic.  Another option would be to help us create a version of BirdLog specifically for your area or conservation group.   

Comments welcome: feel free to post on our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/BirdLog

Article Permalink: http://www.birdseyebirding.com/index.php/blog/104-year-of-the-android