"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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.)
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.
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/
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.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 49.5 ms ] threadIt'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.
I’ve been working on a far nicer way of appreciating bird detections: https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme
Some birds migrate outside Europe.
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!
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-...
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.)Murmurations. They are local movements in comparison, but no less fascinating.