VII · About

What this is

A field notebook for the birds of New Hampshire, organised around one line: common to rare. Most people will see a Black-capped Chickadee two hundred times before their first Bicknell's Thrush. That gradient — from "you'll see this tomorrow" to "people drive three hours and still might not" — is the spine of the whole site.

The voice

Written like a knowledgeable local, not a tourism brochure. Species entries lead with what you'd actually notice first — a call, a flash of colour, a shape on a wire — not a taxonomy dump. Rarity is treated as a spectrum with texture: not a badge, but a mix of how many there are, how predictable they are, and how much of the state, the calendar and the weather you have to line up. No bird was invented. No location was invented.

What's in it

• 20 common species and 10 rare or notable ones, each with ID marks, voice, where-and-when, and a rarity rating.
• 11 birding locations across all five of the regions NH birders actually use — profiles, not pins, with best season, target species and access notes.
• An interactive migration map — a drawn map of the state and a slider for the year — built from real seasonal timing.
• A journal of dated field notes.

Where the data comes from

Species status, seasonal timing and hotspot detail are drawn from:

• NH Bird Records and NH Audubon — status, the state's rare-bird-alert culture, and the Raptor Observatory counts at Pack Monadnock and Carter Hill (daily, September 1 – November 30).
• eBird (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) — seasonal frequency, hotspot locations, and the live sighting feeds described below.
• HawkCount — raptor migration counts for the Monadnock region.
• USFWS refuge accounts for Great Bay, Umbagog and Pondicherry; the Loon Preservation Committee; the Nature Conservancy for the Ossipee Pine Barrens.

Anything on the site that reads as specific — a date window, a count, a place name — traces back to those. If something looks off, it's a bug; say so.

The live data

Two feeds update on their own. The rare bird alerton the home page pulls eBird's recent notable (locally rare or review-flagged) observations for New Hampshire. On the map and the location pages, "recent sightings nearby" resolves the closest eBird hotspot to each site's coordinates and shows its latest checklist rollup. Bird sound clips come from the xeno-cantoarchive, with the recordist and licence shown on each. If a feed is unavailable, the page falls back to its own seasonal content — nothing breaks.

Both feeds are used within their terms. eBird data is requested server-side under theeBird API Terms of Usefor this free, non-commercial, educational site; responses are cached for 30 minutes to an hour, trimmed to what a reader needs, shown with attribution and a link back to eBird, and never stored, re-published as a dataset, or passed on to third parties. Unreviewed observations are labelled. xeno-canto recordings are used per their Creative Commons licences with recordist and licence credited in place.

Illustrations

Every bird sketch and the state map are hand-plotted SVG, drawn for this site at one consistent line weight — closer to a notebook margin than a photographic field guide, and free to animate. No photographs are used.

Contact

Corrections, a hotspot that belongs here, a date window that's wrong for your patch — notes@wingsofnh.com.

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