When I use eBird at FLLT's Park Preserve South, located on Irish Settlement Rd near Midline Rd in the Town of Dryden, which has no cell service, I can use the Track Details by tapping the flaglike feature at the upper left, and it works- sort of. It shows the path I've traveled, so I can tell what compass direction I've been going and whether I'm looping back toward where I've been. But the path is only over a grid, not a map with roads (sometimes including trails), nor an aerial photo. Those map features are only added to the track after I have ended my eBird report and gotten back into cell coverage, but when the path & map are combined, the track appears correctly aligned with the map. So in this sense, I would say that yes, eBird's GPS tracking feature is accurate. However, I doubt eBird always gives an accurate distance. I recently tried to measure the distance while biking between a couple landmarks by doing an eBird report as I traveled between them. I traveled as directly as possible on paved paths without deviating. I stopped several times to count birds and to allow other people to pass me rather than moving aside. The only time I might have briefly been out of GPS contact was a few seconds where the trail went below a couple of roads. My distance on that submitted eBird report was 1.13miles. I was about to use that number but when I looked back in the Track details, it also said Total distance: 1.29miles. There's no way my path wiggled .16miles, and I didn't backtrack at all. So I resorted to holding a ruler up to an old USGS topo map, which told me the distance was about 1.3miles, so eBird's larger number was likely the more accurate, and for unknown reasons it subtracted distance. I don't know what eBird's GPS tracker was doing, but I no longer believe its distance even for the simplest of trips. It's a fairly new iPhone FWIW. I too like eBird's GPS tracking feature, especially for figuring out where I am & which trail choices to take, and I use it a lot. It's nice not to have to try to figure out the correct distance to report when I often backtrack, but I'm not sure the distance eBird calculates is always accurate.
- - Dave Nutter
On Aug 23, 2026, at 2:08 PM, Wesley M. Hochachka <wmh6...> wrote:
Hello James, The question that you're asking isn't quite right. The appropriate question is how accurate the GPS hardware is in your own phone, or maybe how consistently accurate the GPS hardware is under a variety of environmental conditions. eBird records whatever location information your phone's GPS hardware feeds to it, accurate or not-so-accurate. So, to your second question: no, you do not need internet access for eBird tracks, but you do need your phone to be able to receive signals from multiple GPS satellites. I.e. a hike through a slot canyon will possibly not have a terribly accurate eBird track. Wesley
From: <CAYUGABIRDS-L...> <CAYUGABIRDS-L...> on behalf of James Gaffney <jgaffne2...> Sent: Friday, August 21, 2026 16:10 To: <cayugabirds-l...> <cayugabirds-l...> Subject: [cayugabirds-l] E-bird gps I have a question for the group. How accurate is the E-bird gps tracker? Does it matter if during the hike I don’t have internet access for part of it? Thanks for any input. I use it often and really enjoy having it. Jim
