What Bird Is That Forum

Hi folks. I moved to North Carolina last year, and recently started a project: I'd like to see (and photograph) the common birds of the state. Along the way, I'm creating a website. It's still very incomplete, but I'd love some feedback: https://birdsofnc.org/

What would you be interested in seeing on a site like this? I'm planning to add descriptions, maps and bar charts of frequency, and probably some pages about topics that interest me, such as color variations and warbler diversity. I'd like the site to serve as a quick visual reference for other NC birders.

I'm using eBird data to order birds by "commonness" (average weekly frequency, averaged over the year). What's the most common bird in NC? (Hint: it's our state bird.) What's the most uncommon bird I've added so far? It's the Black-throated Blue Warbler, below! Let me know what you think.

I also started making some range maps using data from eBird. Here are some examples. It shows frequency of observations (the proportion of birding reports which report a specific species) for each month in the bar chart and the annual-mean of each county on the map.

I'm trying to think through a "commonness" metric. So far, I think the state-wide frequency metric is biased toward where people are birding, so counties where few people live/go will be poorly represented in the state-wide metric. Maybe that's alright. I need to look through the data some more. Thoughts?

For reference, the data comes from here: https://ebird.org/barchart?byr=2016&eyr ... 12&r=US-NC (as well as similar links for each county).

Edit: fixed an error in the maps.

I was curious to know which birds were most frequently seen on a county-by-county basis. The Northern Cardinal is the most frequently seen for most counties, but crows and some other birds seem to be more commonly seen in the east and west.

GracesWarbler wrote: Fri Jul 03, 2026 9:28 pm I think the state-wide frequency metric is biased toward where people are birding

Guessing the Cardinal being at the top of the list is probably also skewed by the ubiquitous nature of people knowing one when they see it. Same with crow, etc. Still, people going to the trouble of downloading ebird and posting are at least making an effort to learn and pay attention more than the general public. Either way it's probably the best data you'll have to work with - science at its best