Hopefully this crashes
eBird: A crowdsourced bird sighting database
31–40 of 88 posts
Re: eBird: A crowdsourced bird sighting database
#32Does anyone else struggle with counting individual birds? I talk myself out of submitting a checklist to the "Great Backyard Bird Count" like every year because I worry I'm double counting birds and will mess up their data. When you have a bunch of feeders and live halfway in the woods it becomes an issue of: are there 20 mourning doves or 30? 40 finches or 50?
As a long-time eBirder this is something that can be stressful initially, but goes away when you understand more about the math. eBird has excellent documentation of what they hope for [0], but to simplify it I'll just say you should make your best conservative estimate. See one flock of 20 Mourning Doves fly over and another flock of 30 later? Maybe it's completely different birds in the second flock or maybe the initial 20 just picked up some friends? Truthfully the difference in data between entering 30 and entering 50 seems huge, but statistically it's not. In all likelihood you are almost always undercounting common birds and there are probably many more than 50 around if you're seeing a big flock like that.
Don't let feat of uncertainty get you down. A good faith effort to put in estimated data is actually useful, but not entering any data adds nothing.
0: https://ebird.org/news/counting-101/ https://ebird.org/news/counting-201/
Re: eBird: A crowdsourced bird sighting database
#33I have a technical question related to this post. On the front page of the site there's a prominent announcement that the site will be offline for 48 hours for a database migration. Is this fairly common, and is this reasonable?
I've made some small sites but nothing that's ever gained real traction. I've always told myself that if I build something that starts to take off I should learn to do maintenance without interrupting availability. But I also remind myself that for anything I'm likely to build, it would probably be perfectly reasonable to take the site offline for an hour or two to take care of maintenance tasks and updates. I like seeing this approach, and I really like the communication style in the section "What can I do while eBird is down?"
Can anyone with experience maintaining a project of this scale comment on how reasonable a 48-hour downtime period is?
https://ebird.org/news/database-update-november-17-19-mainte...
Re: eBird: A crowdsourced bird sighting database
#34The ebird app is handy. You can use it to get a crowdsourced rarity estimate on an unidentified bird when you're in the field - handy when you're trying to decide between two species (the more common one is a safer bet).
Re: eBird: A crowdsourced bird sighting database
#35I have a technical question related to this post. On the front page of the site there's a prominent announcement that the site will be offline for 48 hours for a database migration. Is this fairly common, and is this reasonable? I've made some small sites but nothing that's ever gained real traction. I've always told myself that if I build something that starts to take off I should learn to do maintenance without int…
It would not be reasonable for a commercial operation that makes money every minute around the clock. But they also need to build their systems differently to avoid downtime for reasons such as these. For a non-commercial organization, it can be different. It all depends on the value and cost of uptime/downtime.
Re: eBird: A crowdsourced bird sighting database
#36I have a technical question related to this post. On the front page of the site there's a prominent announcement that the site will be offline for 48 hours for a database migration. Is this fairly common, and is this reasonable? I've made some small sites but nothing that's ever gained real traction. I've always told myself that if I build something that starts to take off I should learn to do maintenance without int…
I can't speak much about your technical question, but I can provide some context as someone who's used eBird heavily for almost a decade. eBird does go down for maintenance (both planned and unplanned) every few months, but to my memory this is by far the longest maintenance window they've ever done and it has obviously been telegraphed months in advance and almost certainly planned for a time when the site saw lower usage (Mid November is the closest thing you'll likely get to a worldwide low point in bird migration).
They haven't made any announcements about what they're doing during this window, but I would expect it's a pretty monumental change or several large changes they've been holding off on for a long time. It's also worth noting that this is a fairly small non-profit operation. It might be possible to do what they're doing without taking the site offline, but perhaps it would require taking their devs off other projects for several months to make it happen?
Re: eBird: A crowdsourced bird sighting database
#37It's already been mentioned in at least one thread, but the accumulation of data (sightings, photos, sounds, etc.) has enabled the creation of some incredible tools. Probably the most useful for the average person is Merlin[0], which uses machine learning to identify birds based on a photo or descriptive characteristics (Size, color, habitat, etc.). I was skeptical when it was first introduced, but it's surprisingly good with most bird species.
eBird data is tremendously helpful for generating the ID because location and date information can be tremendously important for identifying very similar looking species. To use an example local to me, a smallish brown bird with a brown back and spotted chest on September 10th in my location is probably likely to be a Swainson's Thrush, but could be Hermit Thrush. Three weeks later that same bird is 99% likely to be a Hermit Thrush.
Re: eBird: A crowdsourced bird sighting database
#38I do a bit of wildlife photography in my spare time (follow me on Insta for pictures of British birds and occasionally my cat - https://instagram.com/onion4k ). Recognising birds is surprisingly hard. A lot of them have very subtle differences that can't be spotted easily. For example, telling the difference between a common Thrush[1] and a much less common Redwing[2] is a real challenge. It's a fun and challenging p…
Offf, as some one coming from the UK, thrush vs redwing is not even in the difficult category... Try little brown birds of which there are many, they are basically indistinguishable, they love to hide, so notorious they even get their own wikipedia page[1]; or gulls, also many species, as well as several variations of adolescent plumage; or raptors which in the UK you pretty only see as a silhouette while they are hundreds of feet up in the air, and seen so rarely you never learn to distinguish them by their outline.
Re: eBird: A crowdsourced bird sighting database
#39if you like this you will probably also enjoy birdnet: https://birdnet.cornell.edu/
Birdnet is great! It is an app on your phone which lets you record birdsong and analyse it to tell you which bird you can hear.
I've never been good at identifying birds by their songs, but thanks to this app I'm getting better at recognizing the ones in our local areal.
Re: eBird: A crowdsourced bird sighting database
#40The world of bird sighting is interesting. I have a friend who runs a cruise expedition company in New Zealand. They run trips in the south seas (Antarctica) as well as the North (Russia, Japan) but they have to reposition their ships between seasons. Those repositioning trips are 3-4 weeks at sea with little-to-no land in sight. So what they did to make money was to sell heavily discounted seats to bird watchers because there are some species of birds who are only at sea during this time and this is the only way to see them. Pretty fascinating way to make up some revenue during an otherwise dead period.