The Big Year — A Visual History of American Birding
/ 2 min read
The Big Year — A Visual History of American Birding
Role: Designer, Developer, Researcher Technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, Canvas API, Scroll Animation Focus Areas: Data Visualization, Interactive Storytelling, Natural History, Information Design
Project Overview
A single-file interactive HTML guide telling the full story of competitive birding in America — from the era when ornithologists shot their subjects to Noah Strycker’s jaw-dropping 6,042-species global record in 2015. Six cinematic chapters, each with its own interactive centerpiece.
The Six Chapters
I. The Age of Blood — Audubon shot his subjects. The Passenger Pigeon collapse is interactive: hit “Watch the Collapse” and 200 dots die in real time, year by year, until Martha alone remains in 1914.
II. The Great Turning — Harriet Hemenway’s tea parties, the Lacey Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty. The laws that pulled birds back from extinction.
III. The Field Guide Revolution — Peterson’s 1934 book changed everything. An animated counter shows those 2,000 first-edition copies selling out in a week. The binocular replaced the shotgun.
IV. A Brit Arrives in America — James Fisher lands in Newfoundland, April 1953. An SVG map traces his 30,000-mile Wild America journey with Peterson across the continent. The British listing tradition, transplanted.
V. The Big Year is Born — The four rules of a Big Year, explained as cards. What counts, what doesn’t, and why the honor system is everything.
VI. Records — An animated timeline from Guy Emerson’s 497 in 1939 through Sandy Komito’s legendary 748 to Noah Strycker’s 6,042 global record. Each bar fills as you scroll into it. The 1998 movie year gets its own cast-credits treatment alongside the real birders who inspired it.
Details
Throughout: animated birds fly across the screen in the background, a gold progress bar tracks reading position, and every section animates on scroll. The epilogue traces the evolution from musket to Merlin AI — and lays out the concept for a modern birding app built on this history.