I'm Shelly. I got interested in birds in 2018, after writing a college paper on the Okinawa Rail, a flightless species first discovered in 1978. I started birding seriously in 2025 when I signed up for eBird, and pretty quickly noticed that the modern resources for someone like me, technically literate and curious about how the practice was actually built, were thinner than they should be. shellylynnx.com is what I've been making to fill in that gap.

I write the NYC Subway Birder column here. I'm on the board of the Linnaean Society of New York, the country's oldest natural-history society, continuously active since 1878. I also volunteer with the NYC Plover Project and NYC Parks.

The rest of the time I work in software, currently as a Website Administrator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. My favorite subway line is the N/W. It runs above ground over the Queensboro Bridge and you can see Rock Pigeons from the train.

What I'm building

• The NYC Subway Birder column: long-form essays on NYC birds, migration, and the people who shaped the field.
• The Public Domain Bird Library: a catalog of every major American bird book published before 1929, with author bios and download links.
• Birds Through an Opera Glass: an online edition of Florence Merriam Bailey's 1889 field guide with modern bird audio.
• Tools: small open-source projects at the intersection of birding, art, and the Met's open-access collection.

Connect

Interested in collaborating or just want to say hello? Email subwaybirder@gmail.com about press, commissions, partnerships, or anything else.