Infographic painting of neighborhood birds in Kistilano in March

This project focuses on 8 the 23 species that I observed in my Kitsilano neighborhood during this project. Birds are painted in locations where I commonly observed them during my 13 birding outings (8hrs 42mins total).

I was inspired to do this project when one of my roommates described a bird to me that she had seen in a tree in our back yard. When I showed her a photo of a Northern Flicker she said “Yes that’s the one! Are they rare?”. I proceeded to pull up the Merlin birding app and scroll through the Western Canada list, flipping my phone around everytime I saw a common Kitsilano bird so she could see. She was pretty patient with my overenthusiasm but I could tell that this method of information delivery was pretty tedious.

I decided that for this project, I wanted to create an infographic that was enjoyable to look at, displayed some of the data that I collected such as indicated which species of birds are in the area, simple features to identify them, and where someone would likely see them. I also wanted to make a rough calculation of how often someone might expect to see each species and how many on a given day. To make the information accessible to more people, I decided to make this website! (Bear with me - I have never made a website before so it’s a bit scrappy..eg. the Birds page is the home page and the Home page is just another tab..). So this was kind of a neat way display observational data in a really accessible way.

I went birding in the neighbourhood, took down notes of which species I saw and how many, photographed the species that I could, noted features that I found helpful when identifying them, and recorded where I saw each species (high up in the big maple trees, on the ground in the bushes, on the tips of cherry blossom branches etc). Then, I calculated the percentage of days that I saw each species, and the average number of each species I saw on days where I saw at least one (see the “Birds” tab).

I chose 8 species to focus on for the painting and brief descriptions (see the “Birds” tab). Out of the 8 birds in this painting, 6 are painted from photographs that I took during this project.

While birding for this project, I quickly became comfortable identifying pine siskins, red-breasted nuthatches, dark-eyed juncos, northern flickers, and stellar’s jays by song/call. I normally rely on my binoculars but by going out and listening to the same birds/looking things up many times in a row, I found myself confidently recording these species without having to see them. I also learned the typical behaviours of common birds and where to look for them, for example dark-eyed juncos send to be on or near the ground while pine sisking are high up in the trees.