Software Review: Birder’s Diary

Birders Diary is a program offered by Jones Technologies, who bought it from Thayer Birding Software. In the past, the program was known to crash quite often, causing complications. This seems to have changed drastically in the past few years. A strong feature of Birder’s Diary from the beginning was its ability to recognize multiple names for species, so for example if a birder from the UK who knows a bird by a different name than the North American name enters the British nomenclature in the search engine, they won’t be confused when the bird does not show up in the search listings. A very efficient, effective, and multifunctional software, its only major drawback in the past was it that it had so many bugs.

In terms of support and updates, though, Birder’s Diary makes an excellent showing, far outshining competitors such as Avisys. Their website is excellent, looks great, is easy to navigate, and is very up-to-date. They have an online forum that is regularly updated and visited by the support staff. New tools and updates are added on a regular basis as well. There have already been at least two new features added already in 2009 alone, including a toolkit for uploading software entries to eBird’s online database, making Birder’s Diary one of the few software programs known to have integration with the new and booming field of online birding database tools.

Best of all for the curious would-be customer, Birder’s Diary is also one of the only known birding software programs to offer a totally free 30-day trial of their program. It can be downloaded at their website at http://www.birdersdiary.com/

Posted by Dennis on 03/18 at 02:46 PM