Birds bloom like algae

Ebird (www.Ebird.org) is a collaboration between the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society and is dedicated to collecting and sharing individual bird observations from across the United States. The concept is simple, allow folks to enter their own sightings into the database and connect their sightings to a specific location and time. Since 2002 Ebird has collected over 3 million observations from bird watchers across the U.S. and has begun to process this raw data into usable, graphical information. The most impressive results of this project are the animated occurrence maps. 

What can only be described as amazing these maps overlay a black and white map of the United States counties with sighting data of a single species. Using a concentration of color, ranging from dusty orange indicating low frequency to bright white indicating high frequency the colors seems to shift and morph like an algea bloom. Movement depicts time as a sliding bar at the bottom of the map loops from January to December, giving the viewer an animation of seasonal observations from across the country. We can literally watch as Chestnut-sided warblers burst from the gulf of Mexico in April and flood northward in a matter of weeks, leaving the lower 48 by May, but for a few strips of breeding birds in the Appalachian mountains. Watch Longspurs descend from Canada in the winter or the mysterious migration of the Blackpoll Warbler.