About Easy Street Markets
Easy Street Markets answers a narrow question in as much detail as the public record allows: which wild animals actually live in which US state, when they are seen there, and what to do about it. The answers come from observation data, not from opinion.
Where The Domain Came From
This domain was registered around 2003 and spent about twenty years as an online wildlife merchandise store run by someone else in Gainesville, Florida. It went dark in 2023. I acquired the lapsed domain in 2026 and rebuilt the site from nothing.
I want to be precise about that, because plenty of rebuilt domains quietly inherit a history they never earned. I did not buy that business, I have no connection to the people who ran it, and none of its twenty years belong to me. Easy Street Markets as you are reading it now started in 2026 and is written and maintained by one person.
How The Data Works
The core of the site is 2,418 pages, one for each pairing of 50 US states with the 71 animals we cover. Each page is generated from the records themselves rather than written by hand, which is the only honest way to keep 2,418 pages current.
1,820 of those pages sit on top of species observation records drawn from iNaturalist and GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Together they represent more than 20 million individual observation records. Where a state has enough observations, we break them down by month, which is what lets a page say when an animal is most likely to be seen instead of guessing.
Conservation status for all 60 animals in our species database comes from the IUCN Red List and NatureServe. Bird sound comes from Xeno-canto.
Two different kinds of image appear here, and they come from different places. The engraved illustration at the top of each animal page is a public-domain natural history plate from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, mostly drawn between the 1840s and 1900s. The photographs further down are modern, taken by iNaturalist contributors who licensed their work for reuse under Creative Commons or released it to the public domain. Every photograph names its photographer and links its specific licence. If it cannot show both, we do not publish it.
Saying No Is The Point
The most-read pages on this site are the ones where the answer is no. There are no alligators in Maine. There are no bears in Hawaii. Those pages exist because someone genuinely wondered, and because the useful thing to tell them is that the records show nothing, and here is what the records are.
It would be easy to write every page as though every animal is out there somewhere. It would also be false, and it would make the other 2,417 pages worthless. When the data shows an animal is absent, rare, or only historically recorded in a state, the page says so in those words.
How This Site Makes Money
Three ways, and you should know all three.
Affiliate commissions. The site lists 4,945 wildlife products sold by other retailers, mostly Amazon, Etsy, Zazzle, Walmart, and eBay. If you click one and buy it, the retailer pays me a small percentage of their margin. It adds nothing to your price. The same applies to wildlife tours listed through Viator and to accommodation links through Booking.com.
Products I sell directly. 268 of the products on this site are my own, printed on demand and sold through this site rather than a third party. Those are labelled as ours where they appear.
Display advertising. I am setting up display ads through Mediavine. Once that is live, most pages will carry ads, and advertisers will pay based on how many people see them rather than on anything you click or buy.
What This Site Does Not Do
- Accept payment for placement, or rank a product higher because its seller pays more.
- Invent presence. If the records show an animal is not in a state, the page says so.
- Publish ratings or review counts we did not receive from our own users, or borrow them from another site to dress up a page.
- Hide the affiliate relationship, or the ads, or which products are mine.
- Use a photograph without naming the photographer and their licence.
Corrections
Occurrence data is imperfect and so am I. If a page is wrong about an animal in your state, tell me and I will fix it or explain what the records say. Everything here is written and maintained by Tim, and reachable at tim@easystreetmarkets.com. There is also a contact page.