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smackay 15 hours ago [-]
It's a little abstract, but the map showing swallows breaking out of the south of Iberia, then rapidly heading north is rather cool. You'll get a much better feeling for what this shows, if, early next spring, you find a natural barrier like a river or estuary. Then you can see birds pushing north and understand what these maps are really showing. For extra drama, hope for a strong headwind, and your admiration of what 20 grams of determination can do, will only increase.
317070 18 hours ago [-]
It's odd that you can see the borders between Belgium and France for various birds (like the swift and cuckoo), same for the border between Germany and Poland.
I wonder why that is? There are no topological features defining these borders. Maybe the data is normalised in some way across countries?
Cthulhu_ 18 hours ago [-]
If this is based on bird spotters, I'd say the national bird spotting organizations don't report or watch for the same birds.
ileonichwiesz 12 hours ago [-]
That’s the more likely hypothesis, but I also wonder if different land management practices could be influencing a map like this. Agriculture in Poland is much more fragmented than in Germany - smaller fields of different crops, often separated by meadows and forests, creating lots of niches for biodiversity. In Western Europe you’re more likely to see giant, mechanised monoculture fields as far as the eye can see, leaving less space for agrarian-landscape wildlife.
_joel 18 hours ago [-]
The birds remained part of the schengen zone and have freedom of movement :)
lioeters 11 hours ago [-]
Always been a bit jealous of birds for their freedom. It comes at a cost of course, but so does being human.
Differences in farming practices and hunting rules between countries can have a surprisingly stark effect on the movement patterns of birds, either directly or by affecting their food sources or predators.
I see it's a portal tracking bird data from other websites. I am doing the same but for East Africa, not live birds but generally monitoring biodiversity, what is happening from ebird, to Xeno-canto to iNaturalist every week. Any new research grade species, new updates to ebird and XC sound additions. East Africa is very under monitored compared to other places. Still work in progress. https://platform.maiyoinstitute.org/
krige 17 hours ago [-]
Website doesn't really work properly. As soon as I change the birds and update, it shows 0 birds for entire timespan.
tyrabound 17 hours ago [-]
Could it be you are selecting birds that are not actually in Europe, let alone native, yet are still listed for some reason, e.g., the wild turkey and california quail?
It makes me question the accuracy of the data if anything, especially since the Black Grouse also exists in places that are not mapped and I don’t see anything that could explain omissions, e.g., what the data is based on and how it is collected. My guess based on inexplicable data points for wild turkeys and california quail is that it’s somehow human logged sightings that are accidentally or either impressively logged.
latexr 16 hours ago [-]
> Could it be you are selecting birds that are not actually in Europe
I tried it for birds which I’m certain fly to Europe and also saw nothing. Also, when searching for the species, the image in the little preview was wrong (it was right in the main interface, though).
aennassiri 17 hours ago [-]
Indeed! I wasn't even able to change the bird easily. I like the initiative, though. I remember the whole bird migration from Africa to Europe and how it shapes the skies in autumn and spring.
Some of the bird data used is available in https://www.GBIF.org (website + APIs + data dumps) but not all of it.
For a visualization like this, the place to start is probably the most recent monthly data snapshot which is available on AWS/Google/Azure's open data portals: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence-snapshots
e.g. start with a DuckDB query:
SELECT scientificName, individualCount, year, month, day, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, issue
FROM read_parquet('s3://gbif-open-data-eu-central-1/occurrence/2026-09-01/occurrence.parquet/*')
WHERE class = 'Aves';
(The initial query will be rather slow, I'm currently working on improving this export. I suggest creating a local table and working from that. Alternatively, for a smaller export than "all birds" request a data download through the website.)
__jonas 15 hours ago [-]
This looks like a great resource, thank you for sharing!
darkwater 18 hours ago [-]
Looks like birds really like Iberia to stay during cooler times, just like many UK, Deutsch and French citizens ;)
pyrale 9 hours ago [-]
European swallows migrate to Africa in winter [1], they move through Spain and the middle-east, and a few more adventurous through Italy and Sicily ; and that's why they "bubble up" there first in this view. But you can see that, in the dead of winter, barely any swallow is left in the peninsula.
It would be nice to see the dataset extended to Africa and the middle-east.
As a person who emigrated from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula, birds are not the only ones indeed :)
Most of the German/British tourists seem to come during the summer though, in contrast to the tourist birds who come during winter. Smart of the birds to avoid all the tourists!
lukan 18 hours ago [-]
"Most of the German/British tourists seem to come during the summer though"
That never made any sense to me. I also go rather go with the birds north in summer where it is cool and to spain in winter when it is still warm.
embedding-shape 16 hours ago [-]
Well, your way makes no sense, I visit cold places when they're the warmest (their summer) and make sure to stay home in the summer when it's the warmest. Almost like some people prefer a "cold" life and others a "warm" one, and that's OK :) Not more than preferences, doesn't have to make sense.
lukan 16 hours ago [-]
"I visit cold places when they're the warmest (their summer) "
Which is also what I said?
But otherwise I do prefer a temperate life. Not too hot, not too cold.
embedding-shape 16 hours ago [-]
> Which is also what I said?
Well, "spain in winter when it is still warm" would not be "when that place is the warmest" in my mind. No foul, no harm though :)
lukan 8 hours ago [-]
You visit "cold places when they are warmest" - spain is usually not considered a cold place, but scandinavia is.
alistairSH 17 hours ago [-]
Summer break from school.
Now that there’s no kid in my household, we do travel more in winter (or whenever).
bromuro 17 hours ago [-]
Spanish winter is very cold too - it’s not the tropics.
pantalaimon 17 hours ago [-]
It's not exactly freezing
embedding-shape 16 hours ago [-]
In some places, it definitely is, we go skiing in Spain in the winter :) Besides, even around Barcelona we get snow every 6-7 years, although it's not like in the north of the world exactly.
darkwater 16 hours ago [-]
That was true years ago, even in the Pyrenees (excluding the 2025/2026 exceptional winter) the snow is more lacking than present.
lukan 17 hours ago [-]
It can be, especially in the mountains. But the very south is pretty mild.
barnacs 18 hours ago [-]
This website wants to connect to Google, Amazon, Cloudflare and Twitter among others right off the bat. Great job with the data sovereignty, Europe!
Murmurations. They are local movements in comparison, but no less fascinating.
lioeters 11 hours ago [-]
Seen a photograph of starlings when the flock takes on the silhouette of a giant bird. I've always been fascinated by that kind of (apparent?) collective intelligence. There's seemingly no leader, but from the interactions of swarms of independent actors emerge (what seems like) a larger mind. Surely we humans exhibit such behavior also, when seen from a certain elevated perspective like statistics.
srean 10 hours ago [-]
Photographs don't do justice. Stop everything now and search for videos on YouTube.
You can also search for boids to explore simple rules that replicate such dynamics.
lioeters 10 hours ago [-]
Ooh boids, yes! One of my favorite books is Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. I learned about it from another favorite, Nature of Code, which has a great list of related books. https://natureofcode.com/resources/#further-reading
srean 10 hours ago [-]
Nature of Code is such a great book !
karol 19 hours ago [-]
Anything can be represented by a dot on a screen, but not everything makes sense to be appreciated in this way.
This is really pretty! Going to take a look at it later on.
HarroGoerndt 18 hours ago [-]
Die Visualisierung auf dem Eurobirdportal ist wirklich toll gemacht. Es ist spannend zu sehen, wie Echtzeitdaten aggregiert werden, um die Migration über ganz Europa so detailliert nachzuvollziehen.
cromka 20 hours ago [-]
How do I switch to another bird? I've been on this site for a minute and can't figure it out
mrrudik 19 hours ago [-]
On desktop, I think you have to click on the tiny icon next to the currently visible bird's name ("select new dataset") and pick one from the list that appears on the left side of the screen.
mugul 19 hours ago [-]
And then you have to click "update visualisation" otherwise you're still seeing the data from the previous bird
genezeta 19 hours ago [-]
On desktop you can also click on the > icon on the top left part of the map.
pantalaimon 17 hours ago [-]
If we get the bird design for the new iteration of the Euro notes we can watch a whole nother 'bird' migration.
Hamuko 19 hours ago [-]
Stretching the definition of "live".
embedding-shape 19 hours ago [-]
"Real-time" been +seconds for decades at this point, pretty different from the "original" meaning, so "live" having the same treatment doesn't feel that out of place.
psyphy2 18 hours ago [-]
live + seconds feels pretty different from a time laps over months...
jorams 17 hours ago [-]
They're calling it "live" and "near real-time" because they're aggregating the data from underlying sources daily, whereas traditionally that happened only on much larger time scales.
It's not very fast compared to most things often called "live", so perhaps it's not a great label for this demo viewer, but the goal of the project seems to be to make the data available for research, not so much for this map.
jeroenhd 15 hours ago [-]
To be fair, dead birds don't tend to migrate as much (unless they're helped along and stored in a cooler, if you call that migration).
ionwake 18 hours ago [-]
i find the "old selection" staying up so visible on the screen distracting but i do appreciate this website thanks
jmelo11 18 hours ago [-]
Why the number of birds decreases and then increases? Is it because migration or due to non-observable previous times?
bcraven 18 hours ago [-]
This is a visualisation of Europe.
Some birds migrate outside Europe.
hackersnooze1 11 hours ago [-]
birds migrate
abdullahalharir 15 hours ago [-]
Test
dncornholio 18 hours ago [-]
This is unusable
boutell 17 hours ago [-]
But... but birds aren't real!
blitzar 16 hours ago [-]
The admin interface lets you control the birds.
sph 19 hours ago [-]
Are these the flock cameras I keep reading about?
lukan 18 hours ago [-]
Yes and people don't like them because some want to use them to stop migration.
17 hours ago [-]
plaguna 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tlinden68685 19 hours ago [-]
[dead]
shahe_alam 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
selfawareMammal 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jmelo11 18 hours ago [-]
It looks reasonable well.
shahe_alam 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
NKosmatos 17 hours ago [-]
It shows the movement of birds across Europe, and how the birds move north/south according to seasonal changes. You can select different species and see an animation of bird populations. Site works a lot better on desktop.
I wonder why that is? There are no topological features defining these borders. Maybe the data is normalised in some way across countries?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-4324485... is a notable example of this.
It makes me question the accuracy of the data if anything, especially since the Black Grouse also exists in places that are not mapped and I don’t see anything that could explain omissions, e.g., what the data is based on and how it is collected. My guess based on inexplicable data points for wild turkeys and california quail is that it’s somehow human logged sightings that are accidentally or either impressively logged.
I tried it for birds which I’m certain fly to Europe and also saw nothing. Also, when searching for the species, the image in the little preview was wrong (it was right in the main interface, though).
For a visualization like this, the place to start is probably the most recent monthly data snapshot which is available on AWS/Google/Azure's open data portals: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence-snapshots
e.g. start with a DuckDB query:
(The initial query will be rather slow, I'm currently working on improving this export. I suggest creating a local table and working from that. Alternatively, for a smaller export than "all birds" request a data download through the website.)It would be nice to see the dataset extended to Africa and the middle-east.
[1](swallow migration patterns): https://tbhpartnership.org.uk/news/migration-marvels-part-2-...
Most of the German/British tourists seem to come during the summer though, in contrast to the tourist birds who come during winter. Smart of the birds to avoid all the tourists!
That never made any sense to me. I also go rather go with the birds north in summer where it is cool and to spain in winter when it is still warm.
Which is also what I said?
But otherwise I do prefer a temperate life. Not too hot, not too cold.
Well, "spain in winter when it is still warm" would not be "when that place is the warmest" in my mind. No foul, no harm though :)
Now that there’s no kid in my household, we do travel more in winter (or whenever).
https://books.google.co.in/books/about/In_a_Flight_of_Starli...
Murmurations. They are local movements in comparison, but no less fascinating.
You can also search for boids to explore simple rules that replicate such dynamics.
I’ve been working on a far nicer way of appreciating bird detections: https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme
It's not very fast compared to most things often called "live", so perhaps it's not a great label for this demo viewer, but the goal of the project seems to be to make the data available for research, not so much for this map.
Some birds migrate outside Europe.