Tools for the work part of birding
A bench is where you sit and watch — and where you build things. These four run entirely in your browser: nothing uploads, nothing tracks you, nothing asks you to sign up.
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Hummingbird Nectar Calculator
Scales the 4:1 recipe to any feeder size and gives you sugar in cups and grams. Includes the cleaning schedule by temperature, which is the part most people get wrong.
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Seed & Feeder Matcher
Tick the birds you want across 48 feeder species and see which seed serves the most of them — with the trade-offs shown, not hidden. Works backwards too.
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Nest Box Spec Finder
Hole diameters, floor sizes, depths, and mounting heights for 19 cavity nesters, in inches and millimetres. Prints to a single clean card for the workbench.
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Lifer Log
A life list stored in your browser and nowhere else. Typeahead over 1,000+ ABA-area species, lifer stats, CSV and JSON export whenever you want out.
Why these four
Birding advice is everywhere; birding arithmetic is not. The questions that actually stall people at the feeder pole are small and concrete — how much sugar for a 12 oz feeder, whether safflower will lose you the cardinals, exactly how wide to bore the hole. Those have answers. These tools give them without a 1,200-word preamble about the joys of nature.
Everything runs client-side. That is partly a privacy stance and partly a practical one: a tool that needs no server is a tool that still works in five years, in a field, on a slow connection.
Coming to the bench
- Binocular chooser — a short quiz that lands on a real spec range instead of a top-ten list.
- Migration timing — when to expect each wave in your region.
- Under-birded hotspots — good places near you that nobody is covering.
Got a calculation you keep doing by hand? Tell me about it — that is where all four of these came from.