Citizen+Science+Saturday+2-10

I attended Citizen Science Saturday on February 10 at Prairie Ridge in Raleigh. At the park, we collected data on the bird and duck species we observed for E-Brid, a program that tracks migration patterns and population numbers of birds in our region. We saw three different species of woodpeckers and learned that downing and herring woodpeckers are hard to distinguish between. We also learned that Male cardinals are red and female cardinals are brown, chickadees like to hang out in brush piles, and nuthatches are some of the only birds that can walk down trees. As for the ducks, we found out that male and female ducks of the same species can look vastly different, and also look different depending on their stage of life.

This Science Saturday overlaps with the curriculum and things we learn in this course. The overlaps include wild species (species that exist in a population of individuals in a natural habitat ideally similar to the one in which its ancestors evolved, we observed wild species of bird and duck), bioinformatics (the applied science of managing, analyzing, and communicating biological information; involves building computer databases, providing computer tools to find, visualize, and analyze the information, and providing means for communicating the information, this relates to us inputting our data into the E-Bird database), and population dynamics (the change in size, density, dispersion, and age distribution in a population in response to environmental stress or changes in the environment, we recorded the population numbers of the species we observed).

