About Bird Harbor
A field journal of small, practical tools for people who feed, house and count the birds in their own backyard or garden.
What it does
Bird Harbor sizes a nest box for the bird you hope to attract and gives you a cut list for building it from one board. It mixes hummingbird nectar, matches feeder foods to the birds they bring, spaces markings on windows so birds stop hitting them, checks a bird bath’s depth and keeps a count sheet for your backyard birds. Choose North America or the UK & Europe at the top of any page and the species, units and advice follow.
Where the numbers come from
Every dimension, ratio and rule on the site comes from a named source, listed at the foot of each page: NestWatch and Project FeederWatch at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the National Audubon Society, the American Bird Conservancy, Purdue and Nebraska extension guides, the BTO, the RSPB and the Swiss Ornithological Institute. Where two sources disagree, the page says so. Where we could find no source for a figure, we left it out. Bird Harbor is independent and is not connected with any of these organisations.
The nest box plan, its cut list and its drawings are our own design, built around the sourced measurements. Please check them against your own wood before you cut.
How it works
Everything is worked out in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to a server, and the count sheet and bath checklist are saved only in your browser’s local storage. The site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views without cookies or cross-site tracking and never receives what you type into the tools. See the privacy page for the details.