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 58 minutes ago [-]
Website doesn't really work properly. As soon as I change the birds and update, it shows 0 birds for entire timespan.
tyrabound 36 minutes 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.
aennassiri 39 minutes 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.
317070 2 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?
_joel 2 hours ago [-]
The birds remained part of the schengen zone and have freedom of movement :)
Cthulhu_ 2 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.
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.)
sph 3 hours ago [-]
Are these the flock cameras I keep reading about?
lukan 2 hours ago [-]
Yes and people don't like them because some want to use them to stop migration.
1 hours ago [-]
plaguna 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
barnacs 1 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.
darkwater 2 hours ago [-]
Looks like birds really like Iberia to stay during cooler times, just like many UK, Deutsch and French citizens ;)
embedding-shape 2 hours ago [-]
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 1 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.
alistairSH 54 minutes ago [-]
Summer break from school.
Now that there’s no kid in my household, we do travel more in winter (or whenever).
bromuro 44 minutes ago [-]
Spanish winter is very cold too - it’s not the tropics.
pantalaimon 39 minutes ago [-]
It's not exactly freezing
lukan 27 minutes ago [-]
It can be, especially in the mountains. But the very south is pretty mild.
pantalaimon 37 minutes ago [-]
If we get the bird design for the new iteration of the Euro notes we can watch a whole nother 'bird' migration.
karol 3 hours ago [-]
Anything can be represented by a dot on a screen, but not everything makes sense to be appreciated in this way.
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.
ionwake 2 hours ago [-]
i find the "old selection" staying up so visible on the screen distracting but i do appreciate this website thanks
jmelo11 2 hours ago [-]
Why the number of birds decreases and then increases? Is it because migration or due to non-observable previous times?
bcraven 2 hours ago [-]
This is a visualisation of Europe.
Some birds migrate outside Europe.
dncornholio 2 hours ago [-]
This is unusable
Hamuko 3 hours ago [-]
Stretching the definition of "live".
embedding-shape 3 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 1 hours ago [-]
live + seconds feels pretty different from a time laps over months...
jorams 34 minutes 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.
cromka 3 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 3 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 3 hours ago [-]
And then you have to click "update visualisation" otherwise you're still seeing the data from the previous bird
genezeta 3 hours ago [-]
On desktop you can also click on the > icon on the top left part of the map.
shahe_alam 1 hours ago [-]
what is main purpose of this website?
NKosmatos 42 minutes 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.
boutell 59 minutes ago [-]
But... but birds aren't real!
blitzar 9 minutes ago [-]
The admin interface lets you control the birds.
selfawareMammal 2 hours ago [-]
Why do all public websites work like shit?
jmelo11 2 hours ago [-]
It looks reasonable well.
tlinden68685 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
shahe_alam 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Oleh_h 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 12:42:08 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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 wonder why that is? There are no topological features defining these borders. Maybe the data is normalised in some way across countries?
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.)https://books.google.co.in/books/about/In_a_Flight_of_Starli...
Murmurations. They are local movements in comparison, but no less fascinating.
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.
Now that there’s no kid in my household, we do travel more in winter (or whenever).
I’ve been working on a far nicer way of appreciating bird detections: https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme
Some birds migrate outside Europe.
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.