The Story Behind the Blog

About Trailside Birding

Dave Poortvliet holding a Great Gray Owl on a falconer's glove

A Great Gray Owl encounter — one of those wildlife moments that makes you slow down and just be grateful you were there.

Hi, I'm Dave.

I grew up in Michigan and have been into birds since I was a kid. I'd spend hours watching whatever landed in the backyard, then flipping through a bird book trying to figure out what it was. Binoculars too big for my hands, Peterson's guide falling apart. That part hasn't really changed.

There are moments in birding that pull you completely out of your head — where the world gets quiet and you're just fully there. A Kirtland's Warbler in a Michigan jack pine flat. A Scissor-tailed Flycatcher in Texas. My time with a Great Gray Owl. I keep chasing those moments.

My partner loves being outside just as much as I do — but her thing is the trail. She wants a great hike. I want the eBird hotspot. For a long time, those were different places.

That's where Trailside Birding started. Not as a project, really — just as a question I kept coming back to: where do the best trails and the best birding actually overlap? I started cross-referencing AllTrails ratings with eBird hotspot data, looking for the spots where she'd have a genuinely great hike and I'd have a genuinely great morning with binoculars. Places we could both love, at the same trailhead, at the same time.

It turns out those places exist everywhere — and they're almost never written about together. So I started writing about them.

The Mission
Trailside Birding is the only birding blog that combines AllTrails trail distance, difficulty ratings, and user reviews with eBird species frequency data and hotspot checklists — in a single guide per region.

Every guide on this site is built the same way. I start with AllTrails — pulling the highest-rated trails in a region, the ones with real user reviews, honest difficulty ratings, and accurate distances. Then I cross-reference those locations with eBird hotspot data: species frequency charts, seasonal bar graphs, and community checklists that tell you not just what birds are possible, but what birds are actually likely, in which week, at which spot on the trail.

No other resource does both. AllTrails doesn't tell you which warblers peak in the second week of May. eBird doesn't tell you whether the trail is an easy loop or a quad-burning climb. Trailside Birding does both — because a great day outside shouldn't require consulting four different apps.

Each guide covers one US region, three trails, seasonal timing, species spotlights with Wikipedia links for every bird, Google Maps links to every trailhead, and a practical FAQ. The goal is to be the one thing you read before you go.

What Region Should I Cover Next?

I'd genuinely love to hear what you're hoping to find here. If there's a region where you're trying to figure out which trail also happens to be a great morning of birding, send me a note. That's exactly the kind of problem I'm trying to solve.