Monday, January 13, 2014

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!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

To get rare bird alerts from e-Bird, check out RareBirder at:
http://www.pkzsoftware.com/Pages/RareBirder.aspx