Birding
Across the world, I've been spending more time looking for birds, photographing them, and learning about them. This page turns you into a pixel bird based on your selfie. It's based on your facial features, so for example, a rounder face gives a rounder bird, and your colors become its feathers. Your photo stays on your device. Nothing is uploaded, so feel free to snap away
Take or upload a selfie and the page turns you into a bird-person: it keeps your real face and morphs it onto a bird's beak and feathers, blended to your own colours. Your photo is read on your device and never uploaded.
Drawing your bird...
Your selfie is handled only on your own device, and it stays in your browser's memory just long enough to draw the bird. It is never uploaded or saved to a database, and the site owner never sees or stores it. The bird image leaves your device only if you choose to download it.
My spark bird
Black Oystercatcher
Haematopus bachmani
I was at the Seattle Aquarium on a date with my girlfriend. We were looking at the coastal bird section, and we couldn't get over how silly the oystercatcher looked with its big orange beak and bright eyes. We thought it was so cool, and we were surprised it actually lived in Washington. That's really what made me realize how interesting birds could be.
Fast forward a little over a year later: my girlfriend and I were on a Valentine's Day trip out on the Olympic coast, tide pooling and fishing together, when a group of oystercatchers flew down nearby and started searching for food. It was amazing to see them again in the wild after our first run-in with them at the aquarium.
My birding life list
Every bird species I've logged on iNaturalist, each shown with one of my own photos, pulled live. The most globally uncommon ones I've found are featured up top, with a fact about each.