I just released the first version of eBirdsearch.org – check it out!

I created eBirdsearch.org to fill what I regard as a rather conspicuous gap in the functionality of the amazing eBird.org site.

If you haven’t discovered eBird yet, do so now. It’s an incredible resource and tool for birders, ornithologists, educators – anyone interested in birds. Birders around the world submit millions of observations a year to eBird, providing a wealth of information for viewing and analysis. The more people use it, the better it becomes.

The problem is, the search functionality currently available through eBird is fairly limited. As a birder, I wanted a clear and high-level overview of a region: where are the popular hotspots? What locations yield the most birds? Which are most common? This site attempts to help plug that gap.

All the code for this site is open source and free for anyone to download and play with. I’ve endeavoured to keep the number of data requests to eBird’s site to a minimum so it doesn’t put too much of a stress on their servers, but if it does, they’re entirely within their rights to ask me to take the site down. Hopefully it won’t come to that. I very much hope that one day this sort of functionality will be available directly through eBird, but in the meantime I’ll try to keep the site up and running.