Birding

In 2014 my photography began to drift towards nature and birds. I started casually recording bird observations using the Merlin birding app to identify and save observations locally. In 2018 I moved my observations over to eBird.org where you can find my birding profile (available to logged in users).

Participatory science

Birding is great hobby that allows you to participate in citizen science (also known by the more inclusive “community science” since “citizen” is a term describing one’s legal status within a jurisdiction). Your observations are used by research scientists to track and understand bird populations around the world.

Global organizations like eBird and iNaturalist connect your data with scientists and projects supporting education and biodiversity. Importantly for me, it’s a hobby I can do wherever in the world I happen to be: from my own backyard to travelling around Europe.

Canadians can also find local citizen science initiatives to participate in at Birds Canada, organized by province. These range from continuous ongoing projects such as eBird checklists, targeted studies for one species of bird, and specific “blitz” days or weekends like the Christmas Bird Count or “Global Big Day” events.

Android Birding Apps

The following apps for identifying and observing birds can be downloaded from Google Play:

sBirb

After taking self-study courses at Scrimba to learn JavaScript and React, I built sbirb in Astro and React to house my experiments working with the eBird API to fetch and display data in a way that is not available through eBird’s website nor any other existing birding apps. It isn’t pretty, but it works!

I created this app specifically to track reported but not yet reviewed rare or unusual bird sightings so I could check on the status of my own observations and see when they were confirmed or denied. (Because reasons, this was otherwise impossible without direct access to the API.)

Over time, I added other functions that I found useful when birding, such as a quick “show me a list of which birds have been recently reported in this area” as a “gut check” when I think I’ve seen a certain bird that seems unusual for this time of year. If someone else has recently reported seeing that bird, then it’s a safer bet that it is in fact the bird I think it is.

Watch 2 minutes of my React Conf 2021 talk “Learning in the Browser” where I describe building this tool as my very first React project!