How this started
I wanted to find a way to be more active after my first few sedentary months of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was spending all my time working and living indoors at my apartment and knew I needed to get outside more. I dusted off my old Canon 7D Mark II DSLR and 70-200 mm lens, both of which hadn't seen any real action since photographing football and basketball in college for the athletics department. I began spending many pandemic weekend mornings walking the foot paths at the local marsh, camera and telephoto lens in hand. The wildlife encountered was mostly prevalent Southern California bird species. After a dozen or so weekend birding trips I had built a small library of bird photos and figured I should do something with them. Hence this website.
North Star
I'd like to photograph-then-catalog as many North American bird species as I can. My ultimate goal is to photograph every North American bird species. I'm not to the point where I know if this is really achievable. If it is, I assume it will be a multi-decade endeavor and eventually require careful planning. I'm not taking things too seriously for now and will just incrementally check off as many species as I can.
This website's tech stack
This site is built with NextJS and primarily Bootstrap UI components. It's hosted on Amazon Web Services using Serverless Stack's NextJsSite CDK construct.