Education · Open source

SnowRaven

Dave Gibson

Birding tools and data explorer for your eBird and Macaulay Library exports

Download

Opens the official F-Droid page

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About SnowRaven

SnowRaven reads your eBird and Macaulay Library exports and gives you weather and tides for your checklists, your history with every species, life-list statistics, and an interactive map, on your own phone or tablet. It is free and open source, built by one birder for their own data, and it works alongside eBird and the Macaulay Library.

Weather

Paste a checklist ID and get a weather and tide summary ready to drop into the checklist comment, or look up the forecast for any place and time ahead. The Weather/tide Planner lays out the coming sunrises and sunsets, each with its tide and forecast weather.

Statistics

A dashboard built from your eBird backup: life-list totals and growth, milestones, and when and where you bird. A weather section reads back the weather blocks SnowRaven and RainCrow write into checklist comments: the conditions on the outings you wrote a block for.

Map Explorer

Your sightings on an interactive map, with nearby eBird hotspots and where species new to you were reported recently. Counties shade by your counts or by how complete your county list is, with a California Breeding Bird Atlas overlay.

Species Detail

Your whole history with one bird: sightings, field notes, breeding codes, a map of every observation, and any splits or lumps along the way. A weather card shows the skies and temperatures you found it in, from SnowRaven and RainCrow weather blocks.

Calendar

A year of your birding as twelve month grids, each day shaded by how many species you saw. Fold the years together, or narrow it to a single species.

Targets

A county's targets over your own record: the lifers there, the birds you have yet to photograph, record, or film, and the ones you have never given a breeding code. Rank them by eBird's frequencies or by what has been reported lately.

Multimedia

Your life list as a media checklist: which species you have photographed, recorded, and filmed, and which you still need. Narrow it by sex and age.

Breeding Codes

Every species you have recorded breeding evidence for, as a matrix against eBird's breeding codes, colored by evidence tier.

Checklists

Your checklists as whole outings: search every comment you have written, and filter by what an outing has.

List Comparer

Two life lists side by side, or any two public checklists: what they share and what only one has.

Named Birds

Tag an individual bird by name in a species comment and SnowRaven gathers everything you have on it: sightings, places, a timeline, its own media. With several named birds, one strip puts them all on a shared time axis.

Privacy

Private by default, and in your control: no account, no analytics, no telemetry, no server we run. Your eBird backup, Macaulay Library export, and API keys stay on your device, and in your phone's own backup if you use one. The Android app has no Google services, no Firebase, and no crash reporter. SnowRaven's own code makes no request to Google. Its screens are drawn by your phone's Android System WebView, a system component that may contact Google on its own; SnowRaven turns off the WebView's Safe Browsing and usage statistics, and has no setting for the rest. Privacy policy: https://snowraven.dtgibson.com/privacy.html

How to install SnowRaven

  1. Tap Download — the app's official page on F-Droid opens.
  2. Install it with the F-Droid app (recommended, for automatic updates), or use the download button on that page.
  3. If Android asks, allow the F-Droid app or your browser to install apps, then tap Install.
  4. Open SnowRaven from your app drawer.

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