During Passover holiday I spent the week at my parents house in my hometown Tel-Mond.
The house is located right in front of farm fields so I imagine it will be different from my experience in the city center. Last week in Tel-Aviv, I saw only small birds such as ‘Isabelline Shrike’, ‘Duns Lark’ and ‘Great Tit’.
I did my observation on the weekend and it was great because the weather right now is a bit tricky, some days were really sunny and some blurring. Thanks to my dog, I woke up every day at 6AM and as part of changing my method for watching I thought this would be a great opportunity to see the activity so early. I spent about 20 minutes each day, I planned on less but I was so surprised by the activity that I just felt like I have to stay longer.
On my first day, I felt like I won the lottery because I saw an amazing green bird with an orange beak sitting on an electrical wire
Then, another type of this bird came and set near the first one
And another bird
The follow up day, I saw the same bird type but in much bigger pack (I was really excited)
I got to see some really special birds and after identifying them I found out that two of them are rare too and I was really excited. I found a website in Israel that keeps track of special birds in different locations in the country and I added what I found to the list. https://www.birds.org.il/he/rarityObservationNews
Data Visualization
After watching the first videos I knew I wanted to use data of my own location in Israel. First, I got my API from eBird and then I use the Example of loading data from the eBird API sketch in Glitch. By using Google maps I my lat and lon coordinates.
// get a list of birds near a lat/lon
app.get("/birds", (req, res) => {
var dist = 2;
var lat = 32.12339929801046;
var lon = 34.8200200264314;
var dist = req.query.dist;
var = req.lquery.lat;
ar = req.lquery.lon;
My idea was to see which park in my area is the best one to go bird watching, where is the most activity? By adding /birds I got all the data for my location including the three parks:
I converted a JSON file to CVS on this website: https://json-csv.com so I could load it into my sketch. I noticed that the same bird appeared in all three parks - ‘White Wagtail’ and this is the data factor that I decided to use in my visualization. The sketch was pretty straight forward from the p5 example in our class collection. I used circles to express the number of White Wagtails in each park and by using alpha color I could blend them together. https://glitch.com/edit/#!/p5-lilo?path=views%2Fsketch.js%3A1%3A0
It took me a while to understand Glitch, for some reason it was more difficult for me compared to p5.js, I am looking forward to seeing what I would do in my next sketches and which birds and sounds I will find.
Another thing I did this week is using the birds I found in my Nature Of Code assignment, it is a very fun game where Lesser Kestrel and Monk Parakeet is flying to each other according to the mouse.
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