About this app

Going birding today? Want to keep track of the types and counts of the birds as you see them? Doing a bird census? Live in the United States of America? Then, this app is for you.
This app is designed for speed. It assumes your focus is on birding. The app allows you to quickly--and with one hand--find and enter the bird's name and the count increment "on the fly."
When you are done for the day, use this app to send yourself an email with the results. You can even choose to send yourself a file in the "eBird" format. Then, at home, you can leisurely edit it and upload it to the "eBird" web site.
INSTRUCTIONS: While you are birding, you will use one of the two buttons on the top of the home screen to record what you are seeing. Use the top left button--marked "Speak to Enter"--and say the name of the bird to find its record. Then, scroll through the list of numbers and tap the amount by which you want to increase (or decrease) the count.
If the app can't figure out what you said, it will determine the first letter of what you said. It will present you with a list of birds that start with that letter. You then find the correct bird, tap it, and then increment the count.
Speech recognition makes a connection to Google. If you can't get a cell connection, or are concerned about charges that--depending upon your contract--may apply to that connection, you can choose to press the "Silent Entry" home screen button instead. It will present you with a new screen that asks you to enter the first letter of the bird you want to record. You then find the correct bird, tap it, and then change the count.
When you want to see your total counts for the day, press the "List by Group" button on the start screen. Here you will find the 808 bird species you might see in the United States,in taxonomical order, based on the Audubon Society's bird list. You can change counts from this list by tapping the bird name, then increasing the count. To easily see your final tallies, and perhaps submit them for a census, press the "Hide Zeros" button.
If you would rather see this same list, but arranged in alphabetical order, press the "Alphabetical List" button on the home screen. Here, too, you can change counts and and choose to display only the birds you have seen.
This app saves your counts in an internal database. If you turn off your phone, the data is not lost. When you reopen your app, the counts are still there. (Uninstalling the app removes the database, losing your counts.)
To permanently delete the current counts, simply press the "All Counts to Zero" button on the home screen.
But, before you delete those counts, email them to yourself. Press "Email Bird Counts" from the home screen. On the next screen, tap the text entry box. Type the email address to which you want to send the bird count list. Then, press "Send Email(.txt") to create and send an email with the list included as a simple text file attachment. On the next screen, tap your favorite email app from the list that appears. Finally, tap the word or symbol that sends the email.
If, instead of pressing "Send Email(.txt") you opt to press "Send Email(.csv"), the rest of the procedure is the same. The only difference is the formatting of the attached file and the file type extension. The attached file you send is a ".csv," or "comma separated values" file, used by "eBird."
At home, open that email, and download the attached file. (Before downloading it, make sure your operating system won't over-write your previous bird list file, causing you to lose it.) Open the ".txt" file with a text editor like Notepad. Open the ".csv" file with a spreadsheet program like Excel (set to: open files of type "all files" or "text files") or Google Sheets.
After adding information to the ".csv" file, delete the first row: the header row. Submit it to "eBird" as an "eBird Record Format (extended)."