The Vega Vireos
A website for neighbors to track local bird sightings.
Another day, another project.
A neighbor shared an idea for tracking birds we see in our collective back yard. Could there be some list, some site, some doc, that lets us track the birds we see and then share the list with everyone who lives here?
I already use Merlin BirdID and I've been interested in eBird, so I proposed a technical solution.
Bird Logging
No need to reinvent the wheel here. Merlin BirdID is perfect for figuring out what bird you're looking at or hearing. The missing link is eBird. Submissions to eBird are validated then made public for everyone to see. Even better, there is a standard API where you can poll this sighting data.
Neighbors just need to connect to eBird and submit a checklist of their birds spotted. Anyone who submits a checklist in our area will add information to our site.
Shared Sightings
Now for the part that technology solves. I created a website running in my closet that:
- Polls the eBird sighting data every hour for our location.
- Displays the sightings for today.
- Shows a calendar view so you can go back in time to see historical birds spotted.
Now everyone who lives near Durham Central Park can view the birds submitted to eBird in a very simple way. No login needed. Just a simple list of birds.
Limitations
One frustrating limitation is that the eBird checklists are not immediately available in the geolocation based query. That means that you can submit a checklist in the morning and it might not show up until the afternoon or evening on my site. That delay seems to be on the eBird verification or processing side. Since anyone can submit anything, AND this data is for science, my assumption here is that they're running some filtering or checks on it to make sure I'm not logging penguins in my back yard every day.
Technology Overview
I used Claude Code to help me create the following stack:
- Cloudflare tunnel pointing birds.burns.sh to my service
- Docker host running my service and cloudflared
- Python Flask app with gunicorn
- This is the app that shows the page and does the polling
Name Ideas
Since we live at The Vega I thought we could calls this group something like The Vega Vireos, based on a bird we have around here.
I haven't really figured out whether I want to incorporate this name into the website in any way.
What do you think? What name would you come up with for some Durham Central Park birders.
