Bird Lines
Top 9 birds from iNaturalist in the ALA
How did interest in birds change in 2020? Did the lockdowns in Australia have any effect on the number of bird sightings? Sightings of some popular birds, such as the Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen, Pacific black duck (Anas superciliosa), Magpie-lark (Manorina melanocephala) and Sulphur-crested cockatoo (Cacatua galerita), saw a surge in April 2020, when state-based lockdowns were implemented. Over the winter, this initial surge petered out, before a second spike in September 2020. Instead of a lockdown, this time coincided with the Great Southern Bioblitz, a citizen science project run in cities throughout the southern hemisphere.
The data from these charts comes from the Atlas of Living Australia, retrieved using galah. The plots were made with ggplot2. Code is available here.
