A backyard bird list becomes something else when the same people keep it for twenty-two years.
Visit John and Mary Kormendy’s House Birds page
From spring 2000 until summer 2022, John and Mary Kormendy lived near Dripping Springs in the Texas Hill Country and kept track of the birds around their house.
By the end, the page recorded 125 species seen and two more heard.
That is already useful.
The comments make it better.
Natural history at household scale
The page does not read like a generic species guide. It records what happened at this particular place.
Some birds were breeding residents. Others appeared only during migration or cold weather. Some once-common visitors became rare. A Rufous hummingbird overwintered at the property for multiple years. A Crested caracara appeared only twice in roughly two decades. Golden-cheeked warblers passed through even though the property did not have enough mature oak habitat for them to breed there.
The notes are full of small observations that field guides cannot provide.
Mary once saw a roadrunner leap from the roof to catch a Black-chinned hummingbird. Black vultures sat together on the upstairs deck. Woodpeckers hunted insects from the railing. Ringtails occasionally arrived and moved through the trees “like ballerinas.”
The Kormendys say they updated the pages heavily during 2020, when pandemic restrictions kept them home and paying closer attention. By late that year they had photographs of 64 of the 125 species on the list.
The archive also records change.
The couple moved to downtown Austin in 2022. The page says one final update remained and then the house-bird site would be “finished forever.”
That phrase is strangely perfect for a personal web page.
The site did not fail.
The observation period ended.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes personal natural-history sites because they preserve long spans of attention that are difficult to reconstruct later.
One yard, watched long enough, becomes a dataset with stories attached.