Birding tools

Trip research

Websites

• eBird
• Birds of the World
• iNaturalist
• observation.org - need to explore this much more
• Trip reports - independent reports in particular are a gold mine of information and inspiration
  • Cloudbirders
  • eBird trip report catalog, from Birding Travel group on Facebook
  • Other taxa trip reports
    • Mammalwatching
    • Kim Garwood - Neotropical butterflying trip reports - links mostly broken, but can still scroll to read through archive
    • Mariposa Butterfly Tours - David Geale - Neotropical butterflies
    • Fauna Ventures - Rob Gilson and Peter DeGennaro - butterfly tours
    • Sunstreak Tours - Jeffrey Glassberg - Neotropical butterflies
• Mapping tools - first to help with planning and getting a sense of scale, and then on the ground to navigate
  • Marking points of interest (POIs) - Goat Maps or Caltopo. Formerly Gaia GPS and Google Maps.
  • See below for field navigation towards POIs
  • The True Size - overlaying geographic regions to get a better sense of their sizes and scales, free of Mercator projection distortions.
• Climate data, especially for precipitation and temperature. I've been using TimeAndDate (example is for southern Ecuador), Wikipedia's geography/climate sections of areas (which refer to local government resources), and the below Habitats of the World book is also good, but would love to learn about other resources for this information.
• Travel advisories - consult multiple, as nobody has a monopoly on security information. These are often overcautious, even for me(!), but relative grades are informative.
  • US State Department
  • Smarttraveller - Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
  • UK government - foreign travel advice
• Basic informations and logistics - Wikitravel, TravelIndependent, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Reddit, search engine results, etc.
  • Make sure to check for major holidays that might disrupt travel! Perhaps on Wikipedia or elsewhere.

Media

• Books
  • Habitats of the World - by Campbell, Behrens, Hesse, and Chaon - fun book outlining the characteristics, geography, unique features, and key representative sites of all of the world's habitats. Great context.
  • Field guides - region-specific
    • Birding Ecotours - recommended bird field guides by region
  • Travel narratives, ideally nature-related, and/or immersed in the local culture.
  • Naturalist Journeys have suggested reading lists for many of its tours. For a given tour, click the Know Before You Go tab, and then Suggesting Reading List. Here is an example for NW Argentina. Other tour companies may offer this too.
• Podcasts, especially Naturally Adventurous, that discuss the experience of visiting these locations, especially for nature travel, but also covering culture, food, logistics, etc.
• Videos - a surprising number of people like to take video footage of their trips, harkening back to camcorder days. These can be a good way of getting a sense for a place. Do a YouTube search, and you may be surprised.
  • Some tour companies also put together video trip reports, or even 'virtual tours', see for example Tropical Birding's virtual tours that were presented during the Covid pandemic.

In the field

• Optics
  • Binoculars - Zeiss Conquest 10x42
    • Peak Design Slide Lite strap
    • Also have a pair of Athlon Midas 8x32 that I keep in the car
  • Camera
    • 2012-2025 - Nikon D7100 DSLR + Nikon 300mm f/4 lens + Nikon 1.4x teleconverter
    • 2026-present - OM System OM-1 Mark 1 + OM 100-400mm f5-6.3 II lens
  • Spotting scope - Kowa (need to lookup the model, purchased sometime during the 2000s) + tripod
• Maps
  • Field navigation towards POIs - Avenza Maps when a geo-referenced PDF for a particular site is available (ideal but rare), otherwise CoMaps. Offline map and POI access is essential for this. Formerly Organic Maps and Maps.me.
• Identification
  • Sibley Guide to Birds app, for North America
  • Merlin app, for computer identification of bird sounds.
  • iNaturalist app, for computer identification of non-bird organisms.
• Weather
  • Radar - I use MyRadar and Windy.com interchangeably, which both have good loops and resolution, but open to hearing about other alternatives.

Home office

• Photo processing - Nitro for MacOS. Formerly its predecessor RAW Power, and earlier Adobe Lightroom, and Aperture.
  • My workflow in a nutshell - keep everything (no deleting), flag potential keepers, filter on those, crop, adjust exposure, adjust saturation if needed, done. Shouldn't take more than 30 seconds per photo. Backup all RAWs to external hard drive. Geotag keepers (either manually, or with GPS track taken in the field with something like the Geotag Photos Pro app), and upload to Apple Photos app which is synced with iCloud.
• Sound processing - Audacity
  • eBird's audio preparation tips - I am less shy about applying high-pass filters for reducing background noise, but don't tell them that. At least I try to be relatively careful and conservative with it.
• Scythebill - open-source listing software, can also track taxa like butterflies, reptiles, etc.
• Birdstat - similar to Scythebill, more fun reports and visualizations