About BackyardBird.org
What is BackyardBird.org?
BackyardBird.org is an independent American field guide built specifically for retired and senior backyard birders: 193 species guides, 50 state identification hubs, 200+ side-by-side ID comparisons, and a growing library of feeding and equipment guides — all written by ten retired American birders with 380+ combined years of feeder-watching. Everything is designed for our peers: large readable type, answers in the first paragraph, and advice tested in real yards, not copied from other websites.
Our Mission
The Mission of BackyardBird.org
To give every retired American the joy of knowing the birds outside their window by name — with guidance written for aging eyes, tested by aging hands, and warm enough to feel like a friend at the feeder.
More than 59 million Americans feed birds, and the largest, most devoted group of them is retirees. Yet almost everything written about birding assumes young eyes, strong legs, and a tolerance for jargon. It assumes you can hike to the birds. Our readers don’t need to hike — the birds come to them. What they need is a website that meets them where they are: text they can read without reaching for stronger glasses, instructions simple enough to follow from a porch chair, and identifications that work at 30 feet through a window, not at 300 yards through a scope. That website did not exist. So we built it.
Who We Write For
The New Retiree
Sixty-five years old, first quiet morning in decades, coffee going cold because something red just landed on the feeder. We help you put a name to it — and to everything that follows.
The Window Birder
Maybe the knees aren’t what they were. Maybe the view is a hospital room, a condo balcony, or a favorite armchair. The birds don’t mind, and neither do we — every guide works from a window.
The Grandparent
Nothing beats a grandchild’s face when you call a chickadee by name before it lands. We give you the stories, calls and feeding tricks that make you the family’s bird expert.
Our Story: Ten Porches, One Idea
Every one of us can tell you the exact morning this started. For Hal, it was 1984 on a porch in Cincinnati: a brand-new teacher’s salary, a five-dollar tube feeder, and a Downy Woodpecker that didn’t care about his mortgage. For Edna Faye, it was a Ruby-throated Hummingbird hovering so close to her breakfast table in Lafayette that she could see its tiny feet. We didn’t know each other then. We were just ten ordinary Americans, in ten different states, keeping ten separate notebooks about the birds outside our windows.
Life went on the way it does — teaching years, nursing shifts, mail routes, ranger seasons. The notebooks got thicker. And then, one by one, we retired.
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1980s
The Notebooks Begin
A five-dollar feeder here, a field guide there. Hal sketches feeder designs in the margins of shop-class lesson plans. Margaret starts dating every yard sighting in a librarian’s perfect handwriting. None of us knows it yet, but we’re all writing the same book.
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1990s
The Neighbors Start Asking
It’s the same questions on every street: What bird is this? Why did my finches leave? Is this seed any good? We answer over fences and at church suppers, and we notice something — the answers people find in books and, later, online are written by people who clearly never owned a feeder.
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2000s
The Counts Connect Us
Christmas Bird Counts, FeederWatch seasons, Audubon potlucks — the ten of us cross paths the way birders do. Jim rides out a record irruption in Duluth with forty Evening Grosbeaks on one platform. Betty Lou’s bluebird trail fledges its thousandth chick. The notebooks become libraries.
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2010s
Retirement — and the Realization
One by one we retire, and one by one we discover what millions of Americans discover: the morning feeder check becomes the best part of the day. But we also discover what frustrates them — bird websites printed small, stuffed with jargon, written for twenty-year-olds with hiking boots. Our own peers deserve better.
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2024
The Decision
Over a long video call — ten retirees, ten time zones of porch light — we make it official. We pool ninety notebooks, four hundred years of combined mornings, and every mistake we ever made with a squirrel. BackyardBird.org is born with one rule: field-tested, or it doesn’t publish.
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Today
From Ten Porches to Fifty States
What started as a shared notebook is now 193 species guides, 50 state hubs and 200+ comparisons used by backyard birders across America — still written the same way it began: dated field notes, argued over by friends, re-checked every October, and printed in type you can actually read.
“We’re not experts who learned about birds from books. We’re ten old friends who learned from forty years of breakfasts — and we wrote it all down so your mornings can start where ours did.” — The Avian Biology Editorial Team, from our founding letter
Designed for Aging Eyes and Wise Hands
Most websites are designed for the average 30-year-old. Ours is designed for our readers — and the difference is in every pixel:
Large, Warm Type
18-pixel body text on soft sage parchment — no glare, no squinting, no gray-on-gray.
Answers First
Every guide opens with a Quick Answer box. The short version is always free of scrolling.
Plain Language
No Latin required, no jargon unexplained — expertise that can’t be understood isn’t expertise.
Easy Everything
Big buttons, clear links, gentle contrast — tested by the same aging hands that write the words.
What We Publish
Four kinds of pages, one standard: field-tested and reference-checked, or it doesn’t go up.
Species Guides
Complete backyard profiles of the birds Americans actually see — identification, feeder preferences, behavior, calls and seasonal timing, each built from decades of field notes.
Example: Northern Cardinal →State Birding Hubs
State-by-state backyard bird guides with interactive maps, seasonal highlights and photo galleries — know exactly which species your own backyard can host.
Example: Birds in Maine →Side-by-Side Comparisons
The classic “which one is it?” matchups — Downy vs. Hairy, House vs. Purple Finch, Cooper’s vs. Sharp-shinned — settled with photos, tables and field marks that actually work.
Example: House Finch vs. Purple Finch →Feeding & Equipment Guides
Feeders, seeds, nest boxes, window safety, binoculars — every recommendation survives at least one full season in an editor’s own yard before it reaches yours.
Example: Best Bird Feeders Guide →Why Backyard Birding Matters
We take the backyard seriously because the stakes are larger than they look from the porch:
- Backyards are habitat. North America has lost nearly 3 billion breeding birds since 1970. Suburban yards — planted, watered and fed with care — now form one of the largest distributed habitats on the continent. A well-run feeder station and a native shrub are genuine conservation, done one yard at a time.
- Birding is health. Watching birds is prescribed by doctors for a reason: it lowers stress, sharpens attention, and gives structure to a day. For millions of older Americans — our own peers — the morning feeder check is exercise, meditation and companionship at once.
- Wonder is contagious. A child who learns “chickadee” at Grandma’s feeder becomes an adult who notices the natural world. Every species guide we write is, quietly, an investment in the next generation of people who will care.
What We Stand For
Experience Over Opinion
Every claim on this site traces to a dated field note or a primary reference — the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, USGS, eBird — never to another content farm.
Independence Over Income
No sponsored placements, no affiliate-driven rankings, no free products for reviews. Our only customer is the reader.
Clarity Over Jargon
Plain language, large readable type, and answers in the first paragraph. Expertise that can’t be understood isn’t expertise — it’s showing off.
Birds Before Traffic
If advice would be good for our page views but bad for birds — dyed nectar, cheap filler seed, indoor window decals — we say so plainly, every time.