A little over a year ago, I thought birding was a strange hobby. Today, I'm building a community for it.

That's the short version. The longer version starts with a bird feeder camera, a pair of woodpeckers, and a Bald Eagle in Bar Harbor, Maine that changed everything.

I was looking for something — though I didn't quite know it at the time. My boss and now co-founder, Mark Gallant, had been quietly trying to nudge me toward birding for years. Mark is the kind of birder most people will never meet: 486 species on his life list, over 13,000 eBird records, and a wildlife photography portfolio that stops people cold. For a long time, I smiled politely and moved on.

Then something shifted. I was gifted a backyard feeder. I noticed that two birds I'd always assumed were the same — the Hairy Woodpecker and the Downy Woodpecker — were actually different species entirely. That small discovery unlocked something in me. The world got a little bigger, and a little more interesting.

Then came the Bald Eagle. I was in Bar Harbor, Maine, camera in hand, when one soared into frame. I photographed it. I was hooked. Completely, irreversibly hooked.

The Problem We Couldn't Ignore

As I fell deeper into birding, I started running into the same frustrations over and over. To do everything I wanted — track my life list, get rare bird alerts, find field guides, connect with other birders, share photos — I needed five different apps and three different websites. Nothing talked to each other. Nothing felt like it was built for someone like me, a newcomer trying to figure it all out.

Mark felt it too, from the expert side. And both of us, coming from years working together in digital sports media, recognized the pattern immediately: a passionate, underserved community with no real home base. In sports, community is everything. The shared experience of following a team, debating stats, celebrating wins — that's what keeps people engaged and coming back. Birding had all the raw ingredients for that kind of community. It just didn't have the platform.

So we decided to build it.

What Roost Is Really About

Roost isn't just a community. It's the thing I wish had existed when I first started. A place where a beginner in suburban Philadelphia can get as much value as an expert birding the coast of Massachusetts. A place where you don't need to know anyone personally to feel like you belong to something.

Because here's the thing nobody tells you about birding: the community is enormous. Millions of people across the country are quietly watching feeders, hiking trails with binoculars, chasing rarities on weekends. But it doesn't always feel that way — especially when you're new. Nobody close to me does this. I had no one to call when I spotted something unusual. I didn't even know where to look.

That isolation is exactly what Roost is designed to solve.

In two or three years, I want people to say Roost is where they go for everything birding — the alerts, the content, the community, the gear. I want beginners to feel welcomed and experts to feel at home. I want someone to photograph their first Bald Eagle and immediately have somewhere to share it, celebrate it, and connect with someone who understands exactly why it mattered.

That's the Roost I'm building. And I can't wait for you to find yours.