For years my bird photos lived in the same place everyone’s photos live — scattered across social media, buried under whatever got posted next week. A Sandhill Crane at sunrise gets a few hundred likes and then it’s gone. I wanted something more permanent than that, and more useful.

So I built a website around Michigan Birds.

It’s a home for the birds of this state: a page for every species you’re likely to encounter here, from the Black-capped Chickadee at your feeder to the Kirtland’s Warbler in the jack pines. Each one has photographs, a plain-English description of what the bird is doing here and when, month-by-month presence so you know whether to start looking in March or wait until May, and answers to the questions people actually ask.

There’s also a map — more than nine hundred birding locations across all eighty-three counties, from Muskegon’s lakeshore to the Keweenaw. And you can add your own sightings to it. That part matters to me. A single person’s photo collection is a hobby; a shared record of what’s showing up where is something birders can actually use.

Go look around. Tell me what I got wrong. And go find some birds.