EuroBirdPortal – Live bird movements across Europe (eurobirdportal.org)

193 pointsby NKosmatos10 hours ago53 comments

smackay 4 hours ago

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.

317070 7 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?

Cthulhu_ 7 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.

ileonichwiesz an hour ago

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.

_joel 7 hours ago

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

krige 6 hours ago

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

aennassiri 6 hours 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.

tyrabound 6 hours 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.

latexr 5 hours 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).

kiproping 6 hours ago

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/

__jonas 6 hours ago

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

MattBlissett 6 hours ago

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.)

__jonas 4 hours ago

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

darkwater 7 hours ago

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

embedding-shape 7 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 7 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 6 hours ago

Summer break from school.

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

bromuro 6 hours ago

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

pantalaimon 6 hours ago

It's not exactly freezing

lukan 6 hours ago

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

embedding-shape 5 hours ago

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.

darkwater 5 hours ago

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

embedding-shape 5 hours ago

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.

lukan 5 hours ago

"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.

embedding-shape 5 hours ago

> 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 :)

barnacs 7 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!

srean 6 hours ago

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.

karol 8 hours ago

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

arnemunthekaas 7 hours ago

(Shameless self-plug)

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

bethekind an hour ago

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

HarroGoerndt 8 hours ago

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.

pantalaimon 6 hours ago

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

cromka 9 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 9 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 9 hours ago

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

genezeta 8 hours ago

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

Hamuko 9 hours ago

Stretching the definition of "live".

embedding-shape 8 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 7 hours ago

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

jorams 6 hours 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.

jeroenhd 4 hours ago

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).

ionwake 7 hours ago

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

jmelo11 7 hours ago

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

bcraven 7 hours ago

This is a visualisation of Europe.

Some birds migrate outside Europe.

hackersnooze1 14 minutes ago

birds migrate

abdullahalharir 4 hours ago

Test

dncornholio 7 hours ago

This is unusable

boutell 6 hours ago

But... but birds aren't real!

blitzar 6 hours ago

The admin interface lets you control the birds.

sph 8 hours ago

Are these the flock cameras I keep reading about?

lukan 7 hours ago

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