Scarecrow Group has developed a whole suite of solutions for a variety of industries over its life. However, it all started with airports and that is still where you will find our flagship product: B.I.R.D. Tab, a complete solution that covers dispersal, logging, and analysis.
A product like this is not built overnight. The current B.I.R.D. Tab is the result of much hard work and several generations of improvement.
Back to the Beginning
Although it is also available as a reporting only solution, the full version of B.I.R.D. Tab has a legacy stretching right back to the start of Scarecrow. The dispersal functionality is a vehicle-mounted solution descended from Scarecrow’s very first product, Digi-Scare.
B.I.R.D. Tab’s dispersal functionality does the same job for airport operations teams that Digi-Scare did back in the day – albeit with more calls and an expanded feature list compared to the ‘80s system. In fact, the direct successor to Digi-Scare, Premier 2020, is fully upgradeable to B.I.R.D. Tab as they are built on the same dispersal technology.
Ultima
We started to dabble in separate reporting solutions in the early 2000s, with a GPS-enabled solution called ISIS, before launching our first a fully integrated system for dispersal and mandatory data logging in 2007. This product, the immediate predecessor to B.I.R.D. Tab, was called Ultima.
Although its features and functionality have now been eclipsed by its successor, at its core, Ultima offered the same thing our modern flagship does. It combined a complete dispersal solution and a real-time, fully auditable log of bird activity to help airports complete mandatory record-keeping and analyse trends to better understand bird activity.
Like its modern counterpart, Ultima came installed on a rugged tablet computer. However, as you can see, this was an old style of tablet. At the time it was cutting edge. Now, it’s rather strange to see a tablet with so many buttons and so little screen.
B.I.R.D. Tab Lands
Ultima was a fine solution for its time and very capable, but technology does not stand still and neither do we. Though of course it had updates and improvements over its lifespan, eventually we decided it was time for a bigger overhaul.
We built a new solution from the ground up to replace the old software, and we gave it a new name to reflect what a leap forward this was. Launched in 2014, this was the first version of B.I.R.D. Tab. It still offered effective bio-acoustic dispersal, ICAO-led logging, and powerful reporting capabilities, but in a more advanced, more complete, and more versatile package than ever before.
Of course, that was a whole decade ago now – which means B.I.R.D. Tab has been around for fully a quarter of Scarecrow Group’s life! But today’s B.I.R.D. Tab is still generations removed from the first version. We have maintained a steady stream of software updates, bringing performance improvements and new features to ensure that our flagship product remains a cutting-edge solution for the demands of airports today.
