Why Only Bird Nerds
A place to interact with your existing birding journey, find joy in the patterns you've built, and get inspired for whatever comes next.
The story
"A birding checklist tells a story, but we distill it down into a spreadsheet."
I wanted a way to revisit past trips that wasn't a folder of blurry phone pics or a half-colored map of where I'd been.
So I built an interactive map of my own eBird data — and I figured other birders would love what it does. From there I added features to let you explore your own sightings, replay your best days, and plan your next quest.
There's a lot of room to make this into a really fun site. Will OnlyBirdNerds become the leading birding social platform? We'll have to see.
What we're actually for
Years of checklists, counties, and species aren't just numbers. They're a map of where you've been willing to go, and what you found when you got there. We help you see it that way.
Not competitive — personal. The satisfaction of watching your county list grow, hitting a species milestone, or realizing you've birded every month for three years straight deserves to be acknowledged.
Birding is best when there's something pulling you outside. A county you haven't ticked yet. A season you've missed. A species group you've been ignoring. We surface those nudges so you can act on them.
What's here now
Right now, you can upload your MyEBirdData.csv and watch your entire observation history appear on an interactive dark map — clustered by location, filterable by year, month, state, and county, with iNaturalist photos loaded automatically for every species you've seen.
Badges and quests are computed directly from your data. No account required. Nothing leaves your device. You'll see what you've earned, and what you're close to, the moment your CSV loads.
Next up: saved accounts so your map persists between sessions, shareable links, and eventually a community layer — so you can see where other birders in your area are finding things worth chasing.