eLearningBirds

New: the whole field guide, opened up. 723 species, 101 families, side-by-side comparison and distribution maps — beside the practice and quizzes that teach the calls.

An app for learning bird calls, that doubles as a full field guide to 723 southern African birds.

eLearningBirds is a teaching app first: it gets the calls into your head and keeps them there, by practice and by testing. And because teaching a bird properly means saying what it is, it doubles as a field guide — every species it teaches is written up and photographed.

Everything ships inside the app — 6,100 photographs, 650 recordings, 700 distribution maps, and an account for every species and every one of the 101 families. It is all on the phone from the moment it installs, and none of it needs signal, so it works in a valley with the phone in flight mode. No account to create, no advertising, no subscription.

TODAY Open the app and there is already something to do. Today carries on the list you were part-way through, brings back the calls that have come due for review, and offers a Bird of the Day — photograph, call, and a sentence on why it is confusing. A Family of the Day does the same for one of the families. A ring counts your daily goal and your streak. With a minute to spare, the Speed round asks how many birds you can name in sixty seconds, by ear or by eye.

LEARN Basic and Core are where to start: the birds a guide is expected to know, in lists of fifteen, so a session ends somewhere.

Eight habitat lists follow the biomes — Eastern Savanna, Western Savanna, Grassland, Desert, Karoo, Fynbos, Thicket and Forest. These are the lists to work through for the FGASA bird exams. Each is the birds of that biome and nothing else, split into fifteens, with a ring on every list showing how far through it you are.

Build a list for where you are standing. Tap "From here" and the app offers the species recorded in your area, each with how often it is actually seen there. Turn the dial to 30% and you have the birds you will genuinely hear this weekend, not three hundred you will not. Save it and it behaves like any other list.

Or make your own: search, tap, name it, learn it.

PRACTICE AND QUIZ Practice teaches. Four beats to a card — Listen with nothing on screen, Look at the photographs, Identify from four names, then Rate yourself: no idea, nearly, knew it. The whole identification card is one tap away, and a pass can run in list order, shuffled, or hardest first.

Quiz tests, and it asks six kinds of question so you learn the bird rather than the recording. Hear a call and name it. Hear a call and pick the bird from four photographs. See a photograph and choose its call from three. Tell two calls apart, A or B. Say which family a bird belongs to. Find the odd one out of four. Answer wrongly and it does not simply mark you down — it names what you heard, what you picked, how the two differ, and puts them side by side.

Both modes feed one review schedule. Calls you get right go away for longer; the ones you keep missing come back sooner.

GUIDE Search 723 species by English, Afrikaans or scientific name, or browse all 101 families. Each account opens with a gallery you can pinch to zoom, the call, and the measurements — size, mass, wingspan, residency, abundance, status, endemism. Then the writing: what to look for first, how sexes and juveniles differ, what it looks like in flight, what the call sounds like, habitat, behaviour, breeding.

Compare two species side by side: both photographs, both calls, a written sentence on how to tell them apart, and a table of measurements with the differences marked.

Family accounts say what makes a family a family, and what its name means.

Distribution maps show where each species has actually been recorded.

ME A life list of every call, with how often you have had each one right. Mastery means 80% correct after at least four attempts. 29 badges. And a sound-alikes drill built from the pairs you personally keep confusing — your own mistakes, played back at you.

Photographs and recordings by southern African birders and guides, each of them credited in the app.