Frequently Asked Questions

I am a photographer and I like to take pictures of owls. eBird is a good place to find owl locations. Unfortunately, sometimes it can be a pain to browse their web UI if you want to see a lot of information about a lot of different owl species fast. I made this tool to have one website that me and my friends can go to to get all of the information that we need.

Yes! I am still working on the website on and off as I get time to do it. I don't know if I'll ever get it "done!" You can find my to-do list here. I am going to try to keep this up to date as I find it to be a good resource for me and anyone that's interested in my site.

I have no idea how you ended up here if you don't know who I am. My name is Holden. I have a blog here that i may update sometimes. You can find my social media links there if you really are intersted.

Sorry! eBird considers them a 'protected species' and I am unable to pull those locations from their website. There's nothing I can do to change this unless some rogue eBird employee/volunteer wants to give me an API key that is super privileged. I don't think that will ever be a reality as they are protected for a reason. If you can get me that API key, email me at holden@mnowls.com and we can have a conversation!

Yeah, I plan to. I've contacted eBird before to ask about API rate limits and they've not responded to me. In the documentation for the checklist endpoint, which we use to grab notes and checklist author, it explicitly says you will be banned from the API if you grab too much data from that checklist. I would prefer to NOT get banned! I think for states that are not MN and SD, I will poll for data less often and not include any information about the checklist. This would limit the API calls I need to make. I need to update my backend to make that happen. I'll probably do that soon.

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