How to plan a birding road trip

Long drives are dead time for most people and a missed opportunity for birders. Somewhere along almost any route there are productive spots a few minutes off the highway — you just have no idea which, because you don't know the area. That's a solvable problem.

The problem with birding unfamiliar ground

Planning stops manually means guessing at place names, cross-checking each against sighting data, and working out how far each detours you. It's tedious enough that most people skip it and drive straight through. The information exists — it's just spread across a map and thousands of checklists.

How the Roadtrip Planner works

Enter a start and a destination and Flyway follows your actual driving route — not a straight line — sampling it roughly every 25 miles. At each sample point it looks for nearby eBird hotspots, ranks them by species richness, recent activity and proximity to the road, and keeps the best one. The result is a mile-marked list of stops from departure to arrival.

Rarity flags. Each stop is checked for recent notable sightings. Stops with rarities are marked and shown in amber on the map, so a worthwhile detour is obvious at a glance.

One route, your stops. Every stop has a checkbox, on by default. Untick what you don't want and open the rest as a single Google Maps route with your chosen stops as waypoints.

Prep as you plan. Each stop links to its eBird page, to Maps for that exact point, and to a quiz built from the birds currently reported there.

Getting more out of the stops

Front-load the good ones. Birds are most active in the first hours after dawn. Put the richest stop early rather than saving it for a tired afternoon.
Two good stops beat six rushed ones. Twenty unhurried minutes finds more than five minutes of car-park scanning.
Quiz the stop before you arrive. Ten minutes on the species currently being reported there turns "brown bird, gone" into a confident identification.
Watch the season. Sighting data reflects the last few weeks, so a stop that looks quiet in midsummer may be excellent in migration. Re-run the route closer to your travel date.

Routing is calculated by road, and stops are chosen for being close to your path — so the detour to any given stop is usually only a few minutes. Google Maps limits a shared route to nine waypoints, so if you pick more, the first nine are used.

Plan a route →