Le Sacre du Printemps

My first paying 'job' was volunteering for the National Park Service for the hawk watch at Signal Point. The job was simple. I had to help spot, identify,count and record migrating birds of prey. Doing this meant that I spent my weekends in spring and fall with the Chattanooga birding crowd. When it comes to citizen data collection, you will be hard pressed to find a group more dedicated than the birders. Open Data? Crowdsourcing? These folks have been doing it for a long time. Below are two examples with data from point counts* and a volunteer effort to save a huge dataset.

You can go straight to the USGS Point Count Database to look at some numbers or start at the Migratory Bird Data Center which has other data and background info. The North American Bird Phenology Program is well worth looking at as well. In short, they house an historic collection of bird migration data collected on observation cards. Six Million of them. They are working with a small army of volunteers to scan and enter them all into a database so that they can be analyzed. (There was an article on Wired about the project last year that does a good job of explaining the importance of this data.) Having all of these migration records available will deepen our understanding cycles of bird populations. Mashing this data with other sets on development, climate and environment will tell us a lot about the impact that habitat loss has on specific species of migratory birds.

* A point count is basically what it sounds like. A specific point is chosen and marked, often by nailing a small coin sized marker to a tree. The birder counting that route visits it at regular times and records all bird seen and heard, mostly the latter.

** Original photo credit: R. Bruce Wilkey - 1980 - yes, that is me and yes that jacket is awesome.... have to see if I still have it.