My eBird Data

During my time off one of my goals is to rekindle some enthusiasm for software by experimenting with some new (to me) technologies. I decided that playing with my eBird data would be a good start. I've been recording my bird observations in eBird since 2003, and the eBird web site provides some neat summary information. But they also let you download all of your data in one huge file to do with what you please. After some research and experimentation over a couple days, I was able to import this downloaded data into a relational database. Here are a few interesting results.

Since 2003 I have spent a grand total of 2918 hours birding everywhere and 1400 of those hours birding in this neighborhood. How do those 1400 hours break down by year? Here's a graph:

Isn't this interesting! You can see how my neighborhood birding peaked in 2008 and has gradually dropped off since then. (Since 2014 just started, the total is currently very low.) In 2008, I spent 293 hours birding in the neighborhood -- that's an average of 5.6 hours per week! Back then Lake Creek Trail had not yet been constructed and there weren't many other folks birding this neighborhood. Now seeing someone wearing binoculars on the trail is common, and many of those birders also enter their data into eBird.

I've submitted 789 individual checklists of neighborhood birds to eBird since 2005 and below is a table showing the most numerous birds of those checklists in descending order.
See how White-winged Dove is the most numerous species by far. I've counted over 33,000 of them! But this does not mean there are 33,000 different White-winged Doves in our neighborhood. These are the totals for each species from all 789 checklists.

Common Name	Total Count
White-winged Dove	33405
European Starling	17329
Cedar Waxwing	10779
Common Grackle	7862
Great-tailed Grackle	6663
House Sparrow	6464
Red-winged Blackbird	6329
Least Sandpiper	4526
Blue Jay	4280
Northern Cardinal	4221
American Robin	3799
Northern Mockingbird	2728
Carolina Wren	2706
Killdeer	2643
Mourning Dove	2350
Chimney Swift	2305
Cave Swallow	2156
Purple Martin	2035
Yellow-rumped Warbler	1923
Carolina Chickadee	1772
Ruby-crowned Kinglet	1744
Brown-headed Cowbird	1742
Barn Swallow	1590
House Finch	1339
Turkey Vulture	1242
Bewick's Wren	1158
American Goldfinch	1080

A few more tidbits: Twice in 2008 I spent 6 hours out birding our neighborhood, both times finding more than 60 species. My all-time record for number of species on one checklist was 75 on April 27, 2009. Here's the list.

I can't wait to explore this data further and continue learning these different technologies. The relational database I'm using is SQLite, and I used a neat language called Ruby to manipulate the data before importing it. One of the reasons I picked Ruby is that iNaturalist was implemented in it. Both SQLite and Ruby are free and open-source. And they were both already installed on my Mac!