Burdrs at Shorebird Festival by Andrew

Goals

My main goal with Burdr.com is to bring people who enjoy birds and birdwatching together. Many of you are scattered across the world, but it is our common passion for birds that connects us.

With Burdr.com I know that the people who enjoy birds are often times just as interesting as the birds we watch. I want to share your stories with the world!

I also share interesting news and information about birds and birdwatching from all over the planet. I want to be your source of information for all things relating to birds.

Burdr.com

On Burdr.com, I’ve divided all the posts into five main categories: News, Burdrs, Just For Fun, Learn Stuff and Bird Gear. I hope all the categories are self explanatory, but I wanted to talk a little bit about the Bird Gear category. All the products and gear you see in this category is what I genuinely think is cool, weird, or just interesting. I accept no money to write a favorable or unfavorable post about any of the goods I feature.

Sometimes I have affiliate links to the products I talk about. For example, if you click the affiliate link for a particular product, you then go to the page on Amazon for that product. Now if you end up buying the product, I get a small percentage of Amazon’s profits. The cost of the product is the same whether you click our affiliate link or go to Amazon and search for the product yourself. The reason I do this is to help pay for this site.

I believe in being honest and transparent about my actions. So I just wanted to let you know about this. If you have any questions or comments, please email me!

Beyond Burdr.com

To help me achieve Burdr‘s main goal, I use some of the popular social websites.

Flickr

One Touch by Roberta Hynes

You may have heard of Flickr. It’s a popular photo sharing service that is owned by Yahoo. It’s absolutely free to join, but they do have a Pro Account option that adds a few new features for about $25 a year.

Over on Flickr, I have a Burdr photo group. This is a place where people can share their photos of birds. Now in order to add your photos you do have to be a member of the group, but that’s easy! Sometime the hardest part is getting the pictures of the birds!

Periodically I feature some of the photos in this group on Burdr.com. When I do, I always give credit to the photographer and link to the original source photo. These are your photos, so it’s very important to me to make sure that I give you proper credit for your hard work! The reason I do all of this is to help you share your photos with more people all over the world!

Twitter

Twitter is a free social-networking and micro-blogging service. Whoa! What is that you ask? Well, it’s considered a micro-blogging service because users share short messages called tweets. These tweets are limited to 140 characters or less. If someone is following you on Twitter, they can see your tweets or if you’re following someone you find interesting, you will see theirs. For example, if you’re following Burdr on Twitter you will see tweets about new posts on Burdr, links to photos in the Burdr photo group on Flickr, links to many of your blog posts and many other things related to birds.

This is also a place where I can have actual conversations with many of you. Twitter gives all of us the ability to talk to each other from many different devices in real time.

For those of you who already use Twitter’s free service, follow @Burdr on Twitter!

If you want to learn a little more about Twitter, check out Mashable’s Twitter Guidebook to learn the basics and even master some of Twitter’s features!

Tumblr

Tumblr is a free blogging service. Lots of people use tumblr to share their photos and videos. What I do is find all of the ones that relate to birds or birding. Then I put them on the Burdr Tumblelog for you to enjoy!

About Andrew

I spent over 13 years in the military. The vast majority of that time was spent teaching military and civilians nuclear engineering, reactor theory and how to actually operate one of the 2 nuclear reactors at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (KAPL) in upstate New York.

Herniated Disc by Andrew

While coming back from a tour in Guam and South Korea, I injured my back really bad. I herniated disc L5-S1 April of 2008. As it got worse, I ended up in a wheelchair. Later that year I had a surgery to fix it, but unfortunately the same disc herniated again nearly 30 days later. So I had a second surgery. Things just haven’t been the same since.

I was medically retired from the military due to my condition in April of 2010. I was no longer allowed on a submarine.

I have degrees in Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Because of my medical condition, it makes it difficult to physically do the job I did before.

So I tried to figure out what else I could do. I wrote down all my hobbies, interests and things I was good at. Burdr came out of this!

Febuary of 2009 I started the Burdr Twitter account. I tweeted news, photos, videos and blog posts about birding. It caught on, so I started a Burdr Flickr group the next month. In November of 2009, I created Burdr.com and the Burdr Facebook page. Just recently in January of 2011, I created the Burdr Tumblelog.

Basically I thoroughly enjoy what I do here. This makes it a lot easier for me to work as hard as I do.

I currently live in the beautiful Pacific Northwest near Seattle with my wonderful wife and 4 kitties.

If you would like to learn more about me, you can check out the blog I set up for my wife and I called Andrew and Jennifer’s. I’m also on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Foursquare.

If you have any questions, comments or ways to improve, please contact me!