It’s Time To Collect Data!

January 27, 2021

Join in the fun and start collecting data to better understand what’s going on between the battling birds on the Panama Fruit Feeder cam.

The day has come that many of you have long been anticipating: it’s time to collect data! The research team has cut clips from archived Panama Fruit Feeder cam footage and many of you have helped us test run the data collection protocol. We’re ready to see who the winners and losers are in the battles at the feeding table.

A screenshot of the first question in the data collection tool on Zooniverse. A video player is on the left and the task is on the right. The first question is "Were any birds visible during the clip" with possible answers "yes" and "no."                                                                                             A screenshot of the first question in the data collection protocol.

We need all hands on deck! There are thousands of clips we need to watch in order to document enough battles to be able to piece together the tropical feeder dominance hierarchy (i.e., social rankings based on the winners and losers of those battles).

The data collection is located on Zooniverse, an online platform that hosts thousands of projects where people just like you collect data for citizen science projects. It’s also where we collected data for the first Battling Birds investigation.

Ready to get started?

  1. Head to the Battling Birds: Panama Edition project page on Zooniverse.
  2. Read the Tutorial and check out the Field Guide before beginning.

We hope you have fun! We couldn’t do this investigation without you. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email (birdcams@cornell.edu) or comment below.