Welcome to BirdsOfNC.org! I’m Michael Erb, a North Carolina birder. On this website, I’m planning to catalog some of the common (and not so common) birds of NC, to provide an easy visual reference for other birders.

I’m based in western NC, so the site may have a western focus for now. Ultimately, I’d like to find and photograph the all of the most common birds in the state. All of the photos on this site show wild birds living in North Carolina.

Have comments, questions, or suggestions? Spot any errors? Reach out using the form at the bottom of this page!

How is bird “commonness” decided?

Each bird on the main page has a number ranking how common it is in North Carolina. To determine “commonness,” this site uses the “frequency” metric from eBird, which records how often birders saw a particular species on birding trips. For the main ranking, this site uses the statewide frequency averaged over the year. For maps, we use county-level data, with a medium blue (frequency = 0.5) meaning that half of all birders saw the bird on their trip (a very common bird!), and white (frequency = 0) meaning that none did. Bar charts use state-wide data averaged into monthly values.

This data is gathered by birders around the state, as they create lists of species seen on birding trips. This metric is not perfect, but should provide a decent estimate of bird “commonness.” Have suggestions to improve this? Contact me below! If you’d like to browse the data yourself, you can find it at: https://ebird.org/barchart?byr=2016&eyr=2025&bmo=1&emo=12&r=US-NC

According to this metric, what’s the most common bird in North Carolina? It’s the Northern Cardinal, our state bird! For individual counties, some other birds are more commonly seen in some parts of the state:

For fun, here’s the same approach applied to state data across the U.S.:

Data Sources

The numeric data on this site, which underlies the bird rankings, maps, and bar charts (coming soon!), come from eBird:

• eBird. 2021. eBird: An online database of bird distribution and abundance [web application]. eBird, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Available: http://www.ebird.org. (Accessed: June 27, 2026)

Many resources and people helped inform the bird information on this site. A big thanks to all of those resources, particularly the following (coming soon!).

Contact

This website is a personal project, and is not associated with the creator’s primary employment.