Citizen+Science+Bird+Walk+2-3-18

On Saturday the 3rd of February I attended the Citizen Saturday bird walk at Prairie Ridge in Raleigh. The goal of these Citizen Saturdays is to collect data about the birds living in Prarie Ridge and to get that data inputted into a program called E-Bird. This program tracks certain birds migration patterns and the population numbers of each species in that certain area. While on this action plan, I befriended a very nice lady named Jo and we partnered up to count how many of each species we could identify. Together, we counted 5 male and 4 female cardinals. We also saw some beautiful mourning doves. These doves are actually too big for the hanging feeders and were only able to eat off of the ground feeders. Sadly, on this particular Saturday, there were no ducks to be seen. However, a spotting of a hawk later in the excursion made up for that.

This Bird Walk overlaps with our APES class in the ways of collecting data (as seen in the E-Bird database used in the walk which allows for the easy visualization, understanding, and analysis of the data) and it also showed me some real-life examples of population dynamics (learning about the change in the size of bird populations along with the migration patterns depending on the weather and seasons of the Prairie Ridge station).

Jo can actually be seen here with the grey vest on!