NestWatch by the Cornell Lab 4+

It’s nice that we can all participate in citizen science from our smartphone, but it’s obvious this is an app from a non-profit with limited funds. The app often freezes. Talk-text and auto-correct are both turned off inside the app, so you must very carefully type out all notes and make your own corrections. You cannot upload photos while making an initial entry; you can only take real-time photos. If you try to do so, you end up loitering at the nest violating the contract you agreed to and freaking out the mom & nestlings while you stand at the nest frantically trying to accurately make your entries & get to the one-and-only screen to take your real-time photo. You can only upload pics by returning to the entry after it is saved. You should be able to upload a photo when making the initial entry. It takes numerous seconds to upload each photo. If you exit the app before it finishes uploading, there will be a perpetual message every time you open the app telling you there is an upload pending, but when you access that error message, it tells you there are none pending. The message remains until you find the hidden photo that never finished uploading, delete it, and re-upload it. The web client and the app often seem out of sync. I enjoy NestWatch, feel like I am contributing to ornithology, and recommend the app to others... but I often cuss out my phone while using it! 🤬

I loved this app initially. But in the field, with full 4GLTE signal, it still crashes and freezes. Tried at home on WiFi and same thing. So sad. Could be tremendously useful. I hope they fix the bugs (no pun intended).

Update: now I can’t logon at all? Says it can’t connect. Even tried just making a new account no use. Something changed on their servers that broke the connection?

This useful field companion to the NestWatch citizen science data system It is a very good attempt but has its frustrations. I keep using it because there is not really anything better but it takes practice. It generally works pretty well but you need to get used to some quirks mentioned in some other reviews.

One attractive feature of this system is that the app is designed to work off-line if the user has poor connectivity. But BE CAREFUL with this feature because I have lost data on multiple occasions when data I collected in off-line mode has somehow gotten lost when the data sync fails.