EuroBirdPortal – Live bird movements across Europe | Hacker News Reader

EuroBirdPortal – Live bird movements across Europe

eurobirdportal.org

229 pointsNKosmatos64 comments

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.

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?

If this is based on bird spotters, I'd say the national bird spotting organizations don't report or watch for the same birds.

That’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.

The birds remained part of the schengen zone and have freedom of movement :)

Always been a bit jealous of birds for their freedom. It comes at a cost of course, but so does being human.

Freedom and brains.

Reminds me how "bird brain" is sometimes used as an insult, when they're some of the smartest animals with very densely connected brains. https://www.dhanishsemar.com/writing/bird-brains

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.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-4324485... is a notable example of this.

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/

Website doesn't really work properly. As soon as I change the birds and update, it shows 0 birds for entire timespan.

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).

Would 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

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.)

This looks like a great resource, thank you for sharing!

Looks like birds really like Iberia to stay during cooler times, just like many UK, Deutsch and French citizens ;)

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!

"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.

Summer break from school.

Now that there’s no kid in my household, we do travel more in winter (or whenever).

Spanish winter is very cold too - it’s not the tropics.

It's not exactly freezing

It can be, especially in the mountains. But the very south is pretty mild.

In some places, it definitely is, we go skiing in Spain in the winter :) Besides, even around Barcelona we get snow every 6-7 years, although it's not like in the north of the world exactly.

That was true years ago, even in the Pyrenees (excluding the 2025/2026 exceptional winter) the snow is more lacking than present.

Well, your way makes no sense, I visit cold places when they're the warmest (their summer) and make sure to stay home in the summer when it's the warmest. Almost like some people prefer a "cold" life and others a "warm" one, and that's OK :) Not more than preferences, doesn't have to make sense.

"I visit cold places when they're the warmest (their summer) "

Which is also what I said?

But otherwise I do prefer a temperate life. Not too hot, not too cold.

> Which is also what I said?

Well, "spain in winter when it is still warm" would not be "when that place is the warmest" in my mind. No foul, no harm though :)

You visit "cold places when they are warmest" - spain is usually not considered a cold place, but scandinavia is.

Just asked Google... Madrid's winter temperatures aren't far off my local (DC, USA) temperatures. Valencia is a bit warmer, but not quite "swimming in the Med" warm. But, DC isn't exactly Oslo either.

For me, a week in the Caribbean in Jan/Feb is a nice treat. And if I'm visiting Rome or Athens, I'll try for a shoulder season trip - not too hot, not too cold.

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.

[1](swallow migration patterns): https://tbhpartnership.org.uk/news/migration-marvels-part-2-...

Stretching the definition of "live".

"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.

live + seconds feels pretty different from a time laps over months...

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.

To 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).

This website wants to connect to Google, Amazon, Cloudflare and Twitter among others right off the bat. Great job with the data sovereignty, Europe!

Anything can be represented by a dot on a screen, but not everything makes sense to be appreciated in this way.

(Shameless self-plug)

I’ve been working on a far nicer way of appreciating bird detections: https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme

This is really pretty! Going to take a look at it later on.

In A Flight of Starlings

https://books.google.co.in/books/about/In_a_Flight_of_Starli...

Murmurations. They are local movements in comparison, but no less fascinating.

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.

Photographs 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.

Ooh 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

Nature of Code is such a great book !

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.

How do I switch to another bird? I've been on this site for a minute and can't figure it out

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.

And then you have to click "update visualisation" otherwise you're still seeing the data from the previous bird

On desktop you can also click on the > icon on the top left part of the map.

If we get the bird design for the new iteration of the Euro notes we can watch a whole nother 'bird' migration.

Why the number of birds decreases and then increases? Is it because migration or due to non-observable previous times?

This is a visualisation of Europe.

Some birds migrate outside Europe.

birds migrate

i find the "old selection" staying up so visible on the screen distracting but i do appreciate this website thanks

This is unusable

Test

But... but birds aren't real!

The admin interface lets you control the birds.

Are these the flock cameras I keep reading about?

Yes and people don't like them because some want to use them to stop migration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com