BirdCast
by Cornell Lab of Ornithology, UMass Amherst, Colorado State University · BirdCast
Weather-radar system that detects and forecasts nocturnal bird migration across the contiguous United States, with live migration maps, three-day forecasts and county-level dashboards active each spring and autumn. Turns migration from a textbook abstraction into observable data you can check against your own morning's birding. Nothing else makes continental-scale bird movement legible to a learner, and it is entirely free.
More resources on Birdwatching & Ornithology
All About Birds
Cornell Lab of Ornithology's free bird guide, with species accounts, range maps, photographs and recorded songs for North American birds. Users can identify an unfamiliar bird by size, plumage and sound, and read its behaviour and habitat.
Handbook of Bird Biology, 3rd Edition
The bridge from birding as a hobby to ornithology as a science, and the standard course text since 1972. The Cornell Lab's 730-page ornithology textbook across fifteen chapters on avian evolution, anatomy, flight, song, breeding systems, migration, ecology and conservation. Serves as the text for university ornithology courses and the Lab's own programme.
Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Eastern North America
Teaches bird sound as something you read rather than memorize, using spectrograms organized by speed, repetition, pauses, pitch pattern and tone quality. 608 pages; a companion volume covers western North America. The only resource that gives learners a transferable system for sound rather than rote mnemonics, which is the hardest skill in birding and the one apps most encourage skipping.
The Sibley Guide to Birds, Second Edition
The comprehensive North American field guide, 598 pages of nearly 7,000 paintings by a single illustrator covering plumages, ages and regional forms, with habitat and voice notes for every species and 115 rare species added. One artist's consistent hand across every plate makes plumage comparison possible in a way multi-illustrator guides cannot match.
Macaulay Library
Wildlife media archive running since 1929, now holding over 103 million photos, audio recordings and videos across 10,000 bird species. Lets you compare many recordings of one species to study regional and individual song variation. No commercial song CD or app covers comparable breadth, and hearing twenty recordings of the same species across its range is the actual mechanism by which birders learn calls.
eBird Essentials
Free five-lesson Bird Academy course, roughly three hours with nine instructional videos, covering how eBird works, finding hotspots near you, submitting complete checklists correctly, and using My eBird to track sightings.