A bench, and a workbench
BirdBench makes small, exact tools for North American birders — the kind you use standing at a feeder pole or a table saw, not the kind you read.
Why this exists
Most birding questions that actually stop people are arithmetic. How much sugar for a 12 oz feeder. Whether switching to safflower will cost you the cardinals. How wide to bore a hole so bluebirds get in and starlings don't. These have real answers, and finding them usually means scrolling past a thousand words of atmosphere to reach one number in a table.
So: tools first. Each one does a specific job, loads fast, and gives you the number. The guides exist to go deeper when the number needs context — not the other way around.
What "your data stays in your browser" means here
Literally that. There is no account system, no database, and nothing that profiles you. The Lifer Log stores your life list in your browser's local storage, on your device; BirdBench never receives it and could not read it if it wanted to. The other three tools calculate and forget.
The one measurement here is Cloudflare Web Analytics — cookie-free aggregate page counts, no fingerprinting, no cross-site tracking — so I can tell which tools earn their keep. The privacy page spells out exactly what that does and does not see.
This is partly principle and partly engineering. A site with no server-side state cannot leak what it never had, and a tool that runs entirely client-side still works on a bad connection in a parking lot at 6 a.m. — which is where birders actually are.
How the numbers get here
Nest box dimensions come from established published recommendations — the sort of specifications maintained by NestWatch and the North American Bluebird Society — and each spec card names its source. Where published figures disagree, the tool shows a range rather than pretending to a precision nobody has. Where a value is genuinely uncertain, it's flagged rather than smoothed over.
Species notes, guides, and descriptions are written from scratch here. No scraping, no rewriting someone else's field guide. Illustrations are original line drawings rather than photographs, which keeps the licensing honest and the pages fast.
If you find something wrong — a dimension, a range, a claim about behavior — tell me. Corrections are the most useful mail this site gets.
Who
BirdBench is written and built by Eric Rodriguez, a birder with a patch, a life list, and an unreasonable number of half-built nest boxes in the garage. Backyard and field both count here — the site is deliberately neutral between the feeder crowd and the optics crowd, because most of us are both depending on the weekend.
How it pays for itself
Eventually, affiliate links on gear recommendations — feeders, seed, optics — clearly marked wherever they appear. No sponsored reviews, no paid placements in the tools, and no recommendation for anything I wouldn't hang in my own yard. The full terms are on the affiliate disclosure page, and the privacy page covers the (very short) data story.