Latest Posts
Welcome to the Bird Cams Lab!
Do you love watching the Bird Cams? We invite you to help us create a new project called Bird Cams Lab, funded by the National Science Foundation. The goal of the project is to join viewers from around the world to make new discoveries using the cams. Think of it as like field biology in...
May 7, 2018- Video
Video: A 3-minute Introduction to the Bird Cams Lab
May 8, 2018 How To Use Disqus
What is Disqus? Disqus is an easy-to-use discussion tool that you’ll use to comment or upvote other comments in any Bird Cams Lab forum. On the forums, you’ll be able to post questions, share your thoughts, and provide links to helpful information. In this guide, we’ll show you the simple steps for getting started. Do I need...
May 9, 2018What Kinds of Questions Can We Investigate?
Watching the Bird Cams can generate all kinds of questions. Some questions may have answers already based on past research. Other questions may not have answers yet—but could be answered by collecting and analyzing data from the cams. It’s those questions we hope to identify for potential investigations. As you encounter questions, try categorizing each one: ...
May 18, 2018How to Choose or Refine a Good Cam-Testable Question
So you’ve identified some questions that you think could be answered with cam footage. How do you decide which ones make the best questions for an investigation? Will the answer provide interesting or valuable insights? Would investigating the question yield new insights about birds? How excited are you about investigating the question, compared with other questions? Is...
May 18, 2018Wonder Board Brainstorm: Your Questions, Summarized
From May 29 to June 5, participants posted and commented on more than 50 questions on the Wonder Board! We also received a suggestion to organize the questions by topic to make them easier to digest. To do this, the Bird Cams staff first compiled a list of all the questions, then sorted them into...
June 19, 2018Seven Cam-Testable Questions You Identified in Sorting Activity
Thanks to 62 participants who helped sort 12 questions from the Wonder Board, we have now identified 7 questions that most think can be identified using cam footage. For a summary of results, see the graph below. As you can see, some questions seemed clearly testable using the cams, such as quantifying the amount of time...
June 19, 2018Live from the Bird Cams Lab: Our First Q&A Session
On June 15, 17 participants joined our Bird Cams staff for our very first live Q&A session online. We connected through a link to a Zoom webinar, and because it was our first time using this tool, our team was both excited and nervous to see how it would turn out. At ten minutes to...
June 19, 2018Get Ready to Vote! Here’s a Rundown of the Seven Questions
It’s finally time to vote on the question that you think will make for the best, most interesting investigation. A big shout-out to everyone who shared their thoughts and participated in discussions on the Question Design board. Your input was key to thinking about how to refine the seven cam-testable questions based on four main...
June 28, 2018An Exciting Question, and a Look Ahead
After weeks of brainstorming, sorting, and discussing questions, we now have a winning question to investigate, based on more than 100 votes cast. Out of the seven proposed questions, the runaway winner was “Do the hawks use different kinds of calls in different situations at the nest?” We also saw strong interest in other questions as well....
July 13, 2018