Made a fun birding app while playing with Claude Code. It hooks into the ebird API to help me find nearby locations where I can easily add a new bird to my life list.

The idea was this: Some birds are unusual GENERALLY, but not unusual in specific locations. For instance, bald eagles are rare generally, but if you know about the bald eagle nest by the Lake Natoma bike trail, you're quite likely to find one. I wanted to know: where are those places for OTHER birds? Not just where they've been sighted lately, but where they are CONSISTENTLY sighted? The data exists in ebird to answer that question, but it isn't organized that way.

What the app does is roughly this: 

* Identifies all the birds sighted in the last 30 days nearby that are missing from my life list.
* Scrapes all the checklist data from the last 30 days from the places they were sighted. 
* If those birds were sighted at a specific location more than 50% of the time (with a minimum of 5 checklists), it serves up those sites to me on a map.

You can go in either direction: "I want to find a Lazuli bunting, where's the closest spot near me?" or "I'm in this location, where are nearby spots I could add something to my life list?" Also added a feature that pulls in rarities from ebird. It runs a little script overnight to keep the list up to date for sites near me, but I can force it to scrape a new set of sites if I'm travelling. 

I've never really shared anything on github, but if it's of interest to people, I'll figure it out!

I made an app to find new lifers