What’s new? Well, the Birds of the World checklist is now in place as a template, so if you’d like to make a checklist with all 10,722 birds, that’s super easy now. We’ve also updated the ABA checklist to include Hooded Crane, Northern Giant-Petrel and Mitred Parakeet which just got added this month. And since a Thick-billed Kingbird was seen in Santa Clara County for the first time last year, that checklist needed an update.

Scientific name now visible in the main list

When you tap on a bird name in your checklist, you’ll now see its scientific name as well as the common name. And if you’d like to be able to search by scientific name, there’s an option under Settings (the button in the lower right on the main screen) that lets you do that.

Better searches: Kingbirds are flycatchers too!

Speaking of searches, Birdathon now matches birds if your search term is part of a family name. That means that a search for “flycatcher” will turn up Black Phoebe and Western Kingbird as well as any birds with “flycatcher” in their name.

For eBird export, we’ve made several improvements. Checklist notes now appear in the eBird Report view and you can edit them before exporting. You can also select a checklist location. All your settings in this view are now remembered. Exported checklists now work around a bug in eBird where two checklists with the same Location Name would be put at the same latitude & longitude no matter what lat & lon were in the file. The workaround is that Location Name now has a date and time appended. If you look at the .csv file that gets exported, you’ll see something like “Checklist Wednesday 2020-05-20 23:52.” This ensures that the checklist name is unique and gets its own location based on the latitude and longitude specified in the file.

Importing templates and checklists now works more smoothly; there were times when that didn’t quite work right, but we think we’ve got those fixed now. Also, you can now email a checklist or eBird export file even if you don’t have iCloud Drive enabled. When importing .csv files to templates, Birdathon now ignores the header line if there is one, and it asks politely if you want to make a template out of the file.

There are some other bug fixes and improvements, but that covers the big ones. For a full list, take a look at the release notes in the App Store.

Happy birding!