Lucky Pilot: Birdy

FENG Siheng 冯泗衡 GU Tianrun 顾天润 CHEN Herun 陈河润

Introduction

Why Birds?

Birds are very commonly seen in our daily life. They have massive varieties and are widely distributed in the world. However, most of us know little about them especially the anthropogenic disturbances among their well-being. Human activities have largely influenced their life, both positively and negatively. The expanding of human residents is squeezing their habitats, while anthropogenic noise and transportation may benefit them by expelling possible predators.

We’d like to start with birds trikes because it is a kind of violent encounter of birds and human. Both sides have a complicated system background: migration and aviation, which leads to fruitful findings. The reason why this topic is interesting is also because of its sense of anti-anthropocentrism. The horrible result of birds trike brings about, which both sides desperately want to prevent, should be set on the table where human and birds discuss about the solution together.

Hypothesis

What is the migratory model of birds may have some relationship with birds trikes?
What is the distribution of birds may have some relationship with birds trikes?
What kinds of birds have more possibility to experience a airstrike?
When do birds trikes mostly happen in a day/year?

Datasets

Project Feederwatch

This dataset provides observed bird data in the United States from 1996 to 2021, which details the species, number, location, date (year, month, and day) of the observed birds.

Aircraft Wildlife Strikes

The dataset contains a record of each reported wildlife strike of a military, commercial, or civil aircraft between 1990 and 2015. The wildlife strike database was compiled from reports received from airports, airlines, and pilots and published by the Federal Aviation Association.

eBird Data Product

This dataset is about the relative abundance of observed birds in 2021. It also splits abundance into different observation seasons throughout a year including non-breeding, pre-breeding migration, breeding and post-breeding migration.

Data Story

Through the sorting and preliminary analysis of the datasets, we established the draft of the data story.
We hope to connect our existing datasets through the concept of lucky and unlucky birds, so as to get some interesting conclusions.

We selected 12 specific birds and tried to rationalize their selection criteria.
At the same time, we preliminarily determined the chart type and information level we need to show.
Our data story is temporarily divided into three parts in the draft: data selection, and distribution in both space and time scale.

1.Data Cleaning & Sifting

We define these two kinds of birds by analyzing two key data: the amount of birds being watched & the amount of air strikes happened among all the species. We call the birds were relatively watched more but get strikes less the lucky birds, and the birds were relatively watched less but get strikes more the unlucky birds.

The upper part of the table is the ranking of the number of 12 species of birds observed from 2010 to 2021, and the lower part is the ranking of the number of crashes observed by 12 species of birds from 2010 to 2021.

It can be seen from the figure that among the 12 selected birds, except the first one, all other birds show a distribution trend: birds observed more times have relatively few crashes. Relatively few birds were observed and relatively many crashes occurred. This is consistent with our initial data selection goal.

2.Birds Distribution Visualization

We can see from the chart the proportion of the selected 12 species of birds and their distribution in the United States. It can be seen that the distribution of each kind of bird is relatively concentrated, which is distributed in different regions of the United States, mostly in the northwest and northeast, and less in the central United States.

3.Distribution Visualization of Bird Strikes

We can see from the table the distribution of 12 selected birds in the United States. Different from the distribution of migration, the place where the collision occurred is mainly concentrated in the northeast and central part of the United States, and it is rare in the northwest of the United States.

Through the different colors, we can see that there are great differences in the distribution and migration observation of aircraft colliders in the United States, and the main types are different.

4.The Luckiest & The Unluckiest

5.Seasonal Distribution of Certain Kind of Bird and Strikes

Take Killdeer, a relatively unlucky bird, as an example. We can check its distribution according to different migratory seasons (non-breeding, pre-breeding, breeding, post-breeding or all year round for those who don’t migrate to breed).

We can see that the abundance of this kind of bird (killdeer, the unlucky type, shown as colored map) is relevant to airstrikes (green dots).

Killdeer airstrikes mostly happen from June to September, which is the breeding and post-breeding season of it.

6.Time & Stage Distribution of Bird Strikes Visualization

This diagram will show when the bird strikes occurs in the day and phase of flight, as well as the size of the birds. The time of day will be divided into 5 parts from dawn to night and also unknown ones. While the phase of flight is more complicated, including stages like climbing, approaching, taking off and so on.

We can see that birds killed in these strikes are mostly small sized birds. And people are more likely to ignore or have no awareness of the strike according to the biggest part of phases result in unknown.

Most of the strikes happened in the day, obviously, because the air traffic is busiest. However, some certain kind of birds are more likely to hit a plane in the night, such as American Robin and Killdeer.