About this reference

How this started

Birding Logistics began as a private field reference — a way to make the contacts shared in the Birding Logistics WhatsApp group easier to look up in the field. Every guide, homestay, and local contact on this site traces back to someone in that group sharing a vcf or a phone number. Without that WhatsApp group, this site wouldn't exist.

As demand has grown beyond the group, the reference is expanding fast into a wider field companion — eBird hotspots, species pages, photos, signature-species heuristics. Most of the recent feature work is built rapidly with the help of Claude (Anthropic's AI coding assistant), so expect some rough edges: stale data, occasional mis-classifications, heuristic calls that don't hold up under scrutiny. Report anything off via the WhatsApp group and it'll get fixed.

Dataset

Source vcf files

715

Cards parsed

735

Unique contacts after dedup

458

Locations covered

116

By region

North India

16 locations

West India

28 locations

South India

21 locations

East India

7 locations

Northeast

16 locations

International

10 locations

eBird integration

Each location page pulls supplementary data from the eBird API v2 (Cornell Lab of Ornithology). We fetch hotspots near each location, sample species lists from the top-20 hotspots per location, and resolve common/scientific names via the eBird taxonomy. The resulting JSON is baked into the static build — no runtime calls, no API key in the browser. Species photos come from Wikimedia Commons (primary — curated ID shots with clean CC / public-domain licenses), with iNaturalist as a fallback for species Wikimedia doesn't cover. Only CC-licensed photos are displayed; no key is required for either source.

Locations with hotspots

115

Hotspots cached

5120

Hotspots with species checklist

4630

Unique species indexed

2598

Taxonomy version

2025

Hotspots snapshot

Apr 22, 2026

Species snapshot

Apr 22, 2026

Skipped (1): Brazil — these span too wide an area for a single eBird query (e.g. whole subcontinents) and are excluded from the fetch.

Data disclaimers

• Snapshot, not live. Hotspots and species lists are frozen at the dates shown above. Species counts on eBird tick up with every new checklist; treat our numbers as a starting point and follow any hotspot or species link to the current view on eBird.
• “Signature species” is heuristic. That section flags species we see here but rarely elsewhere in our own 100-location index. A real regional specialty might also be reported at many of our other locations (common false negative), and a bird flagged as signature here might just be a widespread species that's rare in our specific sample (false positive). Cross-check eBird's hotspot page before planning a trip around any single entry.
• Top hotspots, not every hotspot. Each location caps at 50 geo-query hotspots or 100 region-query hotspots, sorted by all-time species count. Smaller local patches outside those caps won't appear even if they're good birding.
• Species index samples the top 20 hotspots per location. The Species search and each hotspot detail page are built from those five per-location checklists. A species only found at rank-6+ hotspots won't show up here — the full list lives on eBird.
• Location-to-eBird mapping is hand-curated. Each of our locations maps to either an eBird region code (e.g. IN-GA) or a lat/lng + radius (up to 50 km). A compound entry like “Pench / Kanha / Satpura / Tadoba” is mapped to a single representative query; locations across multiple states may miss hotspots on the other side of the boundary.

Privacy

This site publishes personal phone numbers of people who did not consent to web publication. Numbers are base64-wrapped in the HTML and decoded client-side when you tap Reveal — search result snippets and plain text scrapers see only the masked form, because the reveal requires a click Googlebot won't make. Anyone running a real browser and willing to click can still extract them.

Treat the masking as a speed bump against casual harvesting, not a lock. If you'd rather not be listed, email and we'll remove the entry.