Collins British Bird Guide

Update from one star to 4. After looking at other app guides for UK, this is the best one I can find. Looks like the search function has been improved as well. Can now do text searches that work! Still not the realtime search filter of other apps that filter results as you type, but usable. A request to the dev team. Please make list export available in EBird format so lists can be directly imported into ebird? Getting lists from Collins to ebird is a manual, one by one process right now. I love the Collins fast listing function that captures just the data you want, from species only to full geocode and noted. Original experience review. Deleted from my phone. Fast easy listing function, decent paintings, good text, poor range maps, great visual approach in ht UI. And essentially unusable in the field as you cannot type sparrow or black and see all the bird names that match instantly. I have ten bird apps on my phone from Sibley to iBird to Morcombe to eBird and every single one of them has alphabetical search. It’s like the app makers have never been in the field using the app. Even more bizarre is that when you are editing a list, the search is alphabetical.

Good for identification but it also used to be great for recording sightings - picking up time and exact location automatically which I could then download to a database. That functionality disappeared and has been replaced, after I bought the upgrade, with a stand-alone app which has proved a nightmare to use so I will have to find another way of recording sightings in the field. Very disappointing.

Moved to England just over a year ago and have loved using this app to get to know the local birds but I no longer have access to my lists that I had made of the birds I had sighted on different journeys! I haven’t paid to “upgrade” to the new version as I can’t tell if that will reinstate my lists! I would if I knew it would!!

The previous version had a great feature where you could make lists of birds seen. Not only does this feature no longer appear all my lists have disappeared too.

The recent update (for which an additional charge was made) seems to have numerous bugs and errors compared to the previous version. Hopefully these will be fixed; it may be helpful to give an option in the app for providing feedback. An example is the picture of the heron- initially it only had one image (previous app had about five of six), this is now corrected but it is now incorrectly titled ‘White Stork’ ! The new version has clearly not been properly checked and for now it is a retrograde step- annoying as I have now paid for the ‘upgrade’ and cannot go back to the previous version! Still basically a good app though.

I am enjoying using the app with my little grandson. We easily made our first list on my iPhone but I later noticed it had not synced to my iPad. Is there anyway of doing that? It would be a great help. Also sharing my list with my wife for her app would be good. Its a great app for the price.

This is a great app. Love the multi-lingual name lists but why does it not include Welsh (or Irish, Gallic, Cornish, isle of mannish?) ??

The long scrolling and filtering interface are very good ways to view the birds and find what you are looking for: much easier than tapping back and forth through pages like an ebook. Other reviews mention missing birds: Redpolls: from my searching the Mealy is the Common. The Lesser doesn’t have a separate entry but is included in the Mealy’s entry. Wagtails: the White and Pied are sub-species and both are covered in the White’s entry. You can also fix this by changing the app’s language in its settings: use ‘English’ instead of British English’. This doesn’t make sense but entry names change, eg, to White / Pied Wagtail and (Common) Redpoll. This is a good app that focuses on birds common to Britain, which make it quicker to use as it omits birds that are uncommon and mostly found in Europe. I think this is a selection from the bigger Collins app, and all the more useful when out-and-about. It’s good on iPhone and better on iPad, looking forward to using it on my new M1 Mac.

Now lacking the ability to export lists from the app. Button is still showing, but it no longer works.

Once I had decided to spend it took me a long time before I chose this app. I chose the wrong one! Difficult layout for a phone. Zoom doesn’t work without tapping image first. Light grey text which is very difficult to read. Would have been far better off with iBird or Pinnacle’s Birds of Britain if only they would update them. Very disappointed.