The Networked Bird Observatory Blog

I’ve made an HTML version of the checklist Dr. Glasscock forwarded to me. You can view it here: Checklist of Welder Birds.

John Rappole, the scientist whose work on shifting bird breeding ranges forms the basis for the scientific goals of the CONE Welder installation, sent a few comments to an email thread with Ken Goldberg (the robotics researcher who is one of the main people behind the CONE project). I was lucky enough to be included on that thread, and John Rappole said it would be okay if I reposted his comments to the blog, so here they are:

Ken,

I checked out the blog. They got just the kind of shots that we had hoped for the Green Jay. Silver left, Green right and Silver left, Black right were both part of a group of six birds that were captured on 30 April at 0700h near the feeders. All six are probably non-breeders (unknown sex and age with no brood patch or cloacal protuberance), probably young of the year from last year. Time will tell. I am hoping that Solon Morse, who is on-site working on rapid range change documentation at Welder for me, will be able to catch one or more of the breeding jays in the vicinity.

It looks like the bloggers are having fun on their own, and their guesses are on target so far - Baltimore Oriole, Painted Bunting, Louisiana Waterthrush, Barn Swallow, Golden-fronted Woodpecker, American Robin, Northern Mockingbird, Indigo Bunting, Buff-bellied Hummingbird, and European Starling are all correct. The only one I would question is the photo shown above the Indigo Bunting entry, which I think is probably a robin rather than a starling - but it doesn’t really matter. I think I will just keep out of the blog, and let them do what they want to do. Responding to their questions could become a full time job!

Best,

John

So there you go. It sounds like what we’re doing is definitely proving useful, especially with the identification of banded birds. With that in mind, here are a few banded-bird shots from the last few days.

First is this shot that txbird took on May 5, showing a rain-soaked Green Jay with a silver band on each leg:

And here’s what I believe is probably a female Brown-headed Cowbird photographed by txbird on May 6, showing a silver band on the right leg (left leg not visible):

Keep those banded-bird shots coming!

I posted previously about my interest in the earliest and latest shots (in terms of time of day) successfully ID’d in the system. Now that the game has ended, there’s a final winner in each of those categories.

The earliest shot ID’d was this one, taken by kiddo on June 7 at 5:31:12 a.m.:

The American Robin showed up frequently in the crack-of-dawn photos, as you can see from this list of the 10 days with the earliest identified shots:

+-----------------------+---------------------+-------+------------------+
| user                  | time                | id    | bird             |
+-----------------------+---------------------+-------+------------------+
| kiddo                 | 2007-06-07 05:31:12 | 14770 | American Robin   |
| elanus                | 2007-05-21 05:31:40 | 11253 | American Robin   |
| elanus                | 2007-06-06 05:33:35 | 14565 | Mourning Dove    |
| noho_bird_club        | 2007-06-14 05:34:35 | 16229 | American Robin   |
| lal                   | 2007-06-12 05:38:34 | 15804 | Mourning Dove    |
| elanus                | 2007-05-06 05:38:57 |  6585 | American Robin   |
| kiddo                 | 2007-05-26 05:40:59 | 12404 | American Robin   |
| lal                   | 2007-06-13 05:41:13 | 16006 | House Finch      |
| lal                   | 2007-06-21 05:44:36 | 17955 | House Finch      |
| tom kellie in beijing | 2007-06-24 05:48:04 | 18576 | Lesser Goldfinch |
+-----------------------+---------------------+-------+------------------+

The winner for latest identified photo was this one, taken by killeshin at 8:46:20 p.m. on June 30:

If the American Robin was the champion early riser, the Mourning Dove was the king of late night, as you can see from this list of the days with the latest identified photos:

+--------------+---------------------+-------+----------------+
| user         | time                | id    | bird           |
+--------------+---------------------+-------+----------------+
| killeshin    | 2007-06-30 20:46:20 | 20009 | Mourning Dove  |
| qmodo        | 2007-06-29 20:42:47 | 19850 | Mourning Dove  |
| oxomoxo      | 2007-06-28 20:42:15 | 19620 | Mourning Dove  |
| rookie       | 2007-06-25 20:40:24 | 19038 | Mourning Dove  |
| rookie       | 2007-06-24 20:37:39 | 18810 | Mourning Dove  |
| killeshin    | 2007-07-01 20:36:20 | 20228 | Mourning Dove  |
| rookie       | 2007-06-05 20:34:10 | 14564 | Mourning Dove  |
| killeshin    | 2007-07-18 20:33:37 | 23446 | Mourning Dove  |
| rookie       | 2007-06-27 20:32:11 | 19400 | Mourning Dove  |
| ttinin       | 2007-05-21 20:30:23 | 11506 | American Robin |
+--------------+---------------------+-------+----------------+

Anyway, congratulations to kiddo and killeshin!

One thing I noticed this afternoon was that there sure weren’t a lot of birds to be seen on the camera. And it wasn’t that we weren’t trying — there were lots of users on the system. Just not many birds. I wonder if there was some kind of noisy construction going on that was keeping them away.

In fact, the following shot of the Western Scrub-Jay taken by robin54 at 1:15 p.m. turned out to be the last bird photo taken today:

If the camera isn’t running tomorrow morning, that could end up being the last bird shot taken from Craig’s deck. I guess that would make me happy; it’s a beautiful shot.

It would have been pretty ironic if the bird shot taken before that one (also by robin54, at 1:04 p.m.) had turned out to be the last one:

I say “ironic”, because (as you probably remember), some 44,000 shots ago a Golden-crowned Sparrow was also the first bird recorded in the game, back on April 20. patti got that image:

Nice pair of bookends, eh? I wonder if it’s the same bird.

I’ve added a restriction that users can only post comments to the site without going through the moderation queue if they have previously posted an approved comment. I think that should stop the pornographic comment spam we’d started to pick up, at the cost of making newcomers’ comments take a little longer to appear.

Please let me know if you notice anything icky slipping through. In the meantime, party on, birdcammers!

I didn’t make note of it at the time (I’ve been pretty busy this week), but it looks like Bryce Lee’s efforts to speed up things like the loading of the My Gallery page, and the deletion of rejected images, have really paid off; the site is much faster at those operations now, leading to a dramatic overall improvement in usability.

Repeating my earlier testing, in which I loaded up 10 copies of the My Gallery page in quick succession and timed how long it took to finish loading each page, it took only 29 seconds to finish loading the last page. That’s less than half the time it was taking before, even under the best of circumstances. Even better, I think the response time now is less sensitive to activity on the system by other users.

Thanks, Bryce!