Project FeederWatch Time Again!

Last year I really enjoyed participating in Project FeederWatch, a program sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada.  In case you don't know, Project FeederWatch is a "citizen science" program in which you spend two days every other week (or if you're really into it, every week) recording the number and types of birds at your feeder from November to April.  I like to watch the birds on the weekend while taking extra time to drink my morning coffee. One nice part of the project is that if I can't watch one weekend, or can only watch a little bit, it's okay!  I also like reviewing my records and seeing how the bird population in my yard has changed over the winter.

This year's round started just a couple of weeks ago, and I am already having a blast welcoming the winter birds back to my feeder.  The early arriving and year-round birds are scoping out the yard, vying for the trees and shrubs with the best views of the feeder.  Because I like have excuses to look at data, I decided the beginning of the FeederWatch season was a good time to review last year's numbers for my yard.

FeederWatch lets you retrieve your past season data in a nice summary table which automatically calculates the average number of each species ("group size") seen for the season.  For example, last year a cohort of messy blue jays kept me busy re-filling the feeder. On count days, I always saw at least 3 and as many as 15 different jays on a given day. The group size value is the average size of that gang of jays - 6.1.

I wanted a graphic representation of this data so that I could get a feel for my "average" backyard bird population.  So, I took this data (bird name and average group size) and created a Wordle:

Wow! I suppose I really did see a lot of starlings -- they live year-round in a field nearby. The large presence of red-winged blackbirds surprised me a bit.  Looking at my data records, though, I see that they didn't show up until mid-February, but when they did, there were quite a few of them.

I think it would be interesting to see Wordle's of other people's FeederWatch data -- and I'll definitely make another one at the end of this year's data count.  If you have other unique ideas for visualizing FeederWatch data, I'd love to hear them. For now, I suppose I should get back to keeping that feeder stocked with seed!