About The Helpful Birder

Hi! My name is Susan and I love birds, as you can probably imagine. You’d pretty much have to if you want to run a blog specific to them, right?

I’m not a professional photographer or ornithologist, but I enjoy both general birding and bird wildlife photography.

By day, I’m a web developer. I’ve been blogging since the early 2000s, and I have a couple of other sites too. One of them is travel-related, and when the coronavirus hit in spring of 2020, the travel industry bottomed out. So I decided it was a good time to start a new blog around a different topic that is near and dear to my heart. Thus, The Helpful Birder was born.

I live in central Florida, and the majority of this site will be about birding in Florida. But I also love to travel and have taken some really great birding trips (or regular trips that included birds, because they always do!) So there will be some personal anecdotes and reports from other locations too.

One thing I really enjoy is keeping a list of the species I’ve recorded in my yard and tracking my worldwide list on eBird.

I really do want this site to be helpful to other birders, so please feel free to reach out and let me know if you have any questions about birding locations, bird species, identification, or photography trips and I’ll be glad to help.