Lifer
A birding map I built on the side. It shows recent eBird sightings near you
and marks the species that would be new to your life list.
How it works
Each view answers a question I kept asking before going out.
Recent sightings nearby
The main map shows what birders have reported to eBird recently, grouped by hotspot with a photo of each species. Target lists narrow it to the birds you still need, for your life list or for this year.
Around the world
Screenshots from four places, from city parks to a mountain forest in Thailand.
United States
New York
Central Park
Photo-rich hotspots across Central Park.
Yellow-rumped warbler, photographed by meWhy I made it
Before a birding outing I would juggle browser tabs: recent eBird reports in one, my life list in another, a map in a third, trying to work out which birds were around and which of those I still needed.
Lifer does that cross-referencing for me, so I spend less time on my phone and more time looking up.
Birding Wrapped
A yearly recap built from your sightings: species totals, new lifers, countries, the hours and months you bird most, and your rarest finds.
How I built it
I built Lifer by myself over about two months, working mostly through AI coding tools, roughly 2,000 prompts in all. That covered every layer: the maps, caching eBird data, the data pipelines, and translations into eight languages.
More than 4,000 birders in over 60 countries have used it since. It also became a reference example in my vibe-coding teaching, where several students adapted the same map-and-targets pattern to subjects they cared about.
Lifer is at lifermap.com.