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EuroBirdPortal – Live bird movements across Europe
- cromka 19d agoHow do I switch to another bird? I've been on this site for a minute and can't figure it out
- mrrudik 19d agoOn 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.
- Hamuko 19d agoStretching the definition of "live".
- embedding-shape 19d 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 19d agolive + seconds feels pretty different from a time laps over months...
- jorams 19d agoThey'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.
- jeroenhd 19d agoTo be fair, dead birds don't tend to migrate as much (unless they're helped along and stored in a cooler, if you call that migration).
- tlinden68685 19d ago[dead]
- karol 19d agoAnything can be represented by a dot on a screen, but not everything makes sense to be appreciated in this way.
- arnemunthekaas 19d ago(Shameless self-plug) I’ve been working on a far nicer way of appreciating bird detections: https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme
- bethekind 18d agoThis is really pretty! Going to take a look at it later on.
- sph 19d agoAre these the flock cameras I keep reading about?
- selfawareMammal 19d ago[flagged]
- jmelo11 19d agoIt looks reasonable well.
- HarroGoerndt 19d agoDie 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.
- jmelo11 19d agoWhy the number of birds decreases and then increases? Is it because migration or due to non-observable previous times?
- bcraven 19d agoThis is a visualisation of Europe. Some birds migrate outside Europe.
- hackersnooze1 18d agobirds migrate
- darkwater 19d agoLooks like birds really like Iberia to stay during cooler times, just like many UK, Deutsch and French citizens ;)
- embedding-shape 19d agoAs 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 19d 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 19d agoSummer break from school. Now that there’s no kid in my household, we do travel more in winter (or whenever).
- bromuro 19d agoSpanish winter is very cold too - it’s not the tropics.
- pantalaimon 19d agoIt's not exactly freezing
- lukan 19d agoIt can be, especially in the mountains. But the very south is pretty mild.
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- ionwake 19d agoi find the "old selection" staying up so visible on the screen distracting but i do appreciate this website thanks
- 317070 19d agoIt'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?
- Cthulhu_ 19d agoIf this is based on bird spotters, I'd say the national bird spotting organizations don't report or watch for the same birds.
- ileonichwiesz 18d agoThat’s the more likely hypothesis, but I also wonder if different land management practices could be influencing a map like this. Agriculture in Poland is much more fragmented than in Germany - smaller fields of different crops, often separated by meadows and forests, creating lots of niches for biodiversity. In Western Europe you’re more likely to see giant, mechanised monoculture fields as far as the eye can see, leaving less space for agrarian-landscape wildlife.
- _joel 19d agoThe birds remained part of the schengen zone and have freedom of movement :)
- dncornholio 19d agoThis is unusable
- barnacs 19d agoThis website wants to connect to Google, Amazon, Cloudflare and Twitter among others right off the bat. Great job with the data sovereignty, Europe!
- Oleh_h 19d ago[flagged]
- shahe_alam 19d ago[flagged]
- NKosmatos 19d agoIt 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.
- shahe_alam 19d ago[flagged]
- boutell 19d agoBut... but birds aren't real!
- blitzar 19d agoThe admin interface lets you control the birds.
- krige 19d agoWebsite doesn't really work properly. As soon as I change the birds and update, it shows 0 birds for entire timespan.
- aennassiri 19d agoIndeed! 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.
- tyrabound 19d agoCould 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.
- latexr 19d ago> 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).
- __jonas 19d agoWould be cool if the data was accessible easily via a public API, but from what it sounds like here that's not really the case https://www.eurobirdportal.org/ebp/en/help/#third_parties https://www.eurobirdportal.org/ebp/en/help/#third_parties
- MattBlissett 19d agoSome of the bird data used is available in https://www.GBIF.org 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 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.)
- __jonas 19d agoThis looks like a great resource, thank you for sharing!
- srean 19d agoIn A Flight of Starlings https://books.google.co.in/books/about/In_a_Flight_of_Starlings.html https://books.google.co.in/books/about/In_a_Flight_of_Starli... Murmurations. They are local movements in comparison, but no less fascinating.
- lioeters 18d agoSeen 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.
- srean 18d agoPhotographs don't do justice. Stop everything now and search for videos on YouTube. You can also search for boids to explore simple rules that replicate such dynamics.
- lioeters 18d agoOoh boids, yes! One of my favorite books is Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. I learned about it from another favorite, Nature of Code, which has a great list of related books. https://natureofcode.com/resources/#further-reading https://natureofcode.com/resources/#further-reading
- srean 18d agoNature of Code is such a great book !
- pantalaimon 19d agoIf we get the bird design for the new iteration of the Euro notes we can watch a whole nother 'bird' migration.
- kiproping 19d agoI 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/ https://platform.maiyoinstitute.org/
- abdullahalharir 19d agoTest
- smackay 19d agoIt'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.