The Flock app will be enhanced with about a thousand hand-drawn illustrations of birds
Ornithological illustrator Kit Hansen, who works in Bolinas, California, has completed 420 watercolor illustrations of birds for the Flock app. In total, he plans to hand-draw approximately 1,000 species recorded in the U.S. and Canada, including species found in waters up to 200 miles from the coast, but excluding Hawaiian birds. The artist still has 584 works ahead of him, according to The Guardian World.
Flock was created by Hansen’s friends—designer Adam Donkin and Bob Stevenson, who has experience working as an art director, design director, or producer on more than 50 video games. They began working on the project in 2017 and decided to fund it themselves. Donkin was previously a lead product designer at Amazon, where he worked on several models of the Kindle e-reader.
According to the creators’ vision, the app is not meant to keep users glued to their screens, but rather to encourage them to observe birds in nature. In Flock, you can search for bird species and other users, log sightings, post photos, send messages, and view a ranking based on the number of different species spotted throughout the month.
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Instead of a “like” button, the app features a “high-five” reaction. According to Stevenson, this decision was made, in part, because children were using the app: the reaction was meant to celebrate a new sighting, not to encourage the collection of likes.
It can take Hansen up to four days to create a single watercolor painting. Donkin scans and processes new batches of illustrations, and an algorithm determines the order in which they are prepared: priority is given to common species that users are more likely to see, such as the American robin and the northern cardinal. The latest Flock updates also include animations that bring the drawings to life; Stevenson created them using artificial intelligence, taking Hansen’s recommendations into account.
Flock was released on the Apple App Store in early 2025. By April of that year, the app had about 100 users, and now that number stands at approximately 1,000, even though the creators did not run a marketing campaign. Among Flock’s users is writer Amy Tan, author of *The Backyard Bird Chronicles*.
