Birds of Switzerland
A pocket reference
Birds of Switzerland is a small directory for on the go.
As parents, you may know the situation when children ask what a beautiful bird is up in the tree and you don’t know the answer: “Is it a magpie or a jay?”.
With this app you can quickly scroll through the list of Swiss birds and, thanks to the beautiful pictures of the Sempach Ornithological Institute, confirm your suspicion that it is a jay after all.
With this app you have easy access to the data of the Sempach Ornithological Institute (https://www.vogelwarte.ch/voegel/) without having to use a web browser.
The app was developed as an open source project and the source code is freely available. Everyone can contribute with comments, feedback and ideas.
A new birds App? Why?
Birds of Switzerland is the missing iOS app I’d hoped would be provided by the Swiss Ornithological Institute along with their very informative website, on which all kinds of bird species that can be found in Switzerland can be looked up, linked to more detailed information and photos.
In order to make this same information accessible on the go I started developing Birds of Switzerland in November 2019.
Birds of Switzerland allows the user to find birds by searching through the vast list by name or one of several categories. While used with a network connection, Birds of Switzerland loads the requested list of birds, images and sounds from the Swiss Ornithological Institute’s website https://www.vogelwarte.ch/en/birds/birds-of-switzerland/ and caches the data locally in order to keep already accessed data available on the go. Data is not preloaded but accessed data is cached.
Beta testing
Birds of Switzerland is currently in an public beta testing phase.
Prerequisites to install the Birds of Switzerland app are:
- iPhone or iPad running latest iOS 13
- TestFlight app from Apple
- WLAN or mobile network access
If you want to join testing and give feedback, you can get your TestFlight invite here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/Yn6BOjxX
Please contact me in case of questions or problems joining the beta.
Copyright
Birds of Switzerland has been written as an open source project, i.e. the full app code is available on GitHub.
The bird related data, including photos and sounds is loaded from the Swiss Ornithological Institute’s website and belongs to their respective copyright holders. It cannot be used without permission from the Swiss Ornithological Institute (more details here).
Privacy
You can read the privacy policy here.
Acknowledgments
- Swiss Ornithological Institute for their information gathering, their research and conservation projects to support our native birds and their very detailed website.
- @kocher_sandra for the permission to use her picture of a Blue Tit as icon and start-up image for Birds of Switzerland.
Impressions
Screenshots
| Device | Bird of the Day | Main Screen | Search | Detail (top) | Detail (middle) | Filter criteria | Sort options | By bird group |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| iPhone |  |
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| iPad |  |
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Screencasts
