Everything on this site is built from sources you can check. This page explains what we use and where the limits are.
Bird data
Which birds appear for a place and month is calculated from bird sightings published on GBIF.org – above all the eBird Observation Dataset of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. We use only records published under CC0 or CC BY 4.0, from 2019 to 2024.
- Your place: all sightings within 30 km of the centre of your ZIP code area (first three digits) or UK postcode grid cell.
- States and regions: all sightings reported in that state or UK nation.
- Feeder birds only: we keep species that regularly use feeders, bird tables or nest boxes, and drop very rare visitors (below 0.25% of sightings in their best month).
- Share of sightings: how often a species is reported compared with all birds reported that month. It tells you how common a bird is, not how many individuals there are.
- Arrival and departure: for migrants we count the sightings themselves, because spring migration brings so many reports that shares are distorted in May.
Sightings show where people watch birds. Towns, parks and popular birding sites are over-represented, and a bird that is common in the area may still not come to your garden.
Products
We have not tested the feeders and cameras ourselves. Product pages compare manufacturer specifications, prices on the makers' or retailers' websites on the date shown, subscription terms and which birds a product suits. We link to our sources in tables and text. We never show star ratings or prices copied from Amazon.
If we test products in the future, the pages will say so clearly and show our own photos and measurements.
Photos
Bird photos come from iNaturalist contributors under CC BY 4.0 or CC0 and are credited on each card with a link to the original. The feeder-camera scenes at the top of some pages are illustrations created for this site and are labelled as such.
Corrections
If you spot a mistake, write to kai@kai-rauch.de. We correct factual errors and update the date on the page.