Know what's flying through your city, day by day
One of the most rewarding parts about being a birder is learning to read the details of the seasons. This planner is designed for you to be able to keep a record of your birding year, and to see how the patterns of your own observation sit beside the patterns of nature.
Every day of the year lists the birds you can expect where you live: who arrives, who leaves, who is at its peak, and which rarities have turned up. It's all drawn from three years of real sightings in your own county, so a Chicago planner and a Los Angeles planner are two very different books.
Every cover is a bird map
Each cover maps the city by its birds. Every patch is coloured by the common bird seen most in that neighbourhood, so you can find your own block by who lives there.
Pages made for pencils.
A week on every spread
The left page is yours: a dot grid for notes, with space for goals and highlights. The right page holds the seven days, each with room for location, time and what you saw.
Down the edge runs a little flock of triangles, one for each kind of bird around that week. The busier the week, the taller the flock.
What to look for each day
Each day lists the birds to watch for by banding code, grouped by what's happening. Holidays and local events, like your city's Christmas Bird Counts, are marked too.
â–² Arriving for the season
â–¼ Departing
☆ At their peak
★ Rarities seen nearby
A dial for every month
Each month opens with a dial, one slice per day. Add a dot in a bird's colour for each species you see, or shade the rings to track something else, like your mood. Tally the month and the year so far in the boxes.
COLOUR KEY
â–² Ducks & geese
â–² Seabirds, loons & grebes
â–² Herons & marsh birds
â–² Shorebirds
â–² Gulls & terns
â–² Raptors & owls
â–² Woodpeckers
â–² Doves, swifts & hummingbirds
â–² Songbirds
Colours you can match with pencils
Inside, every bird is marked with a small triangle in its group's colour. The colours are chosen so an ordinary set of coloured pencils can match them.
Your city's full checklist
At the back is every bird recorded in your area, each with a checkbox, a star for lifers, its banding code, and its common and Latin names. Blank rows at the end leave room for surprises.
Banding codes are the four-letter shorthand bird banders use: AMRO for American Robin, RWBL for Red-winged Blackbird.
About the book
Printed to order, one copy at a time.
SIZE — A5, 148 × 210 mm, paperback or hardcover
PAGE — 122 pages, covers included
YEAR — January to December 2027, week by week
DATA — Three years of community bird records: GBIF, 2022–2024, checked against eBird
Daily Birds is a project by Jer Thorp. jer.thorp@hey.com
Bird records from GBIF.org contributors, including eBird. Wing lengths from AVONET (Tobias et al. 2022). Banding codes from the Institute for Bird Populations.