Cornell Feeders Live: Data Exploration Is Around The Corner

April 21, 2021
A horizontal bar chart with species along the vertical axis and the number of observations recorded for each species rom 0 to 50,000 on the horizontal axis. There is a picture of each species next to its name and each bar is a color that the species has (ex: American Goldfinch bar is yellow). There were 1484 observations for American Goldfinch, 37,905 for Black-capped Chickadee, 15042 for Blue Jay, 9538 for Northern Cardinal, 2502 for Red-bellied Woodpecker, 43063 for Red-winged Blackbird, 10034 for Tufted Titmouse, and 2203 for White-breasted nuthatch.
A horizontal bar chart showing the number of observations recorded for each study species.

Thank you to the 495 people who participated in the data collection phase, from tagging data to sharing your thoughts and questions on the Discussion Board. We’re excited to start digging into the incredible amount of data you collected: more than 120,000 observations!

We’ll be seeking to answer two questions with this data: (1) What is the daily visitation pattern of different species at the feeders? (2) How does weather affect the probability of different species visiting the feeders? To answer these questions, we’ll use visitation data that was collected during the live data tagging activity and weather data that we retrieved from a weather station at the Ithaca Airport (less than two miles away).

So sit tight while the Bird Cams staff works with the data to create visualizations so that we can all explore together in the next phase of the investigation: data exploration.

If you can’t wait and want to take a peek at the raw data yourself, please feel free to reach out to us at birdcams@cornell.edu. Thanks again for helping us reach this milestone; we can’t wait to continue working with you all in the next phase of the investigation.