I had an idea to write about birds this month because, among other things, this newsletter is getting older and, as we all know, you age and one day you wake up and suddenly care about birds. I searched the newsletter archives for “bird” and … nothing? Shearwaters show up back in Feb 2024 but I didn’t call them birds, possibly I was in my “birds are just fish in the sky” era. Well, this ends now because birds have great data stories and, even if you just want to be a ‘bird looker,’ you are connected to the avian data ecosystem.

For example, the USGS Bird Banding lab has been around since 1920. They’ve banded 85 million birds, with the help of 7,700 non-USGS people trained to safely attach tiny bands to the legs of living birds. Anyone can report an ‘encounter’ with a banded bird. The long-term data reveals all sorts of patterns about birds and the habitats they use, which influences hunting seasons and what gets planted in public spaces and, in turn, what birds you see when you go for a walk. If you’d like to help track birds but want to keep a little more distance from the beaks and talons, you could build a Motus tracking antenna and become part of the radio telemetry network.  

We recently hosted two webinars on using the Darwin Core data standard for ocean data. We co-led them with intrepid data wrangler Steve Formel, who made a great slide called “many paths to the top of the mountain” to illustrate the ways you can integrate data standards into your current work to make the data more accessible and reusable. One example? eBird, Cornell University’s iconic bird data collection program. If you have the Merlin app, you can have it identify the calls and songs of the birds you hear outside, contribute data to public repositories, and increase our shared understanding of bird world. Or you can use Rosemary Mosco’s guide to which bird sounds are the most metal.

Thank you for coming to my bird talk. At Intertidal we work at intersections -- people and data, land and sea, and sometimes both fish and fins. I’ll close out with some good ocean news, big and small:

• Congratulations to everyone who worked for years on the newly ratified High Seas agreement. We look forward to seeing amazing new collaborations, explorations, and discoveries about that half of the ocean, like how polymetallic ocean nodules make oxygen on the deep sea floor and that there are 200 species of anglerfish.

• For anyone working on ocean data preservation and curation, we released the draft data prioritization framework from the July ESIP meeting. Combine that with the updated Repository Resilience materials and get going securing the ocean data you need now and in the future.

-Kate & Rachael

Special thanks for the conversations & inspiration this month: the Open Geospatial Consortium team, Lisa Jaguzny, Tom Shyka, Catherine Madden, Mark Parsons, Andrew Means, Joel Gurin, Abby Andre, Linus Stoltz, Danie Kinkade, and Mike Pol’s dad jokes