We dove into the millions of bird songs identified by Haikuboxes in 2022 to see what we might learn about species abundance.
We reviewed sound identification data from five Haikuboxes -- a total of 1.3 million identifications in about six months -- and learned that at each site, just five birds were so abundant that they accounted for over half of all detections. While there were some species which were abundant at several Haikuboxes (we're looking at you, House Sparrow and Northern Cardinal), there were clearly site-specific frequent visitors like the Red-winged Blackbird in New York and the Fish Crow in Florida.
Top five birds at each site were:
New York: House Sparrow, Song Sparrow, Northern Cardinal, Black-capped Chickadee and Red-winged Blackbird
Florida: Tufted Titmouse, Fish Crow, Carolina Wren, Northern Cardinal, and House Sparrow
Indiana: House Sparrow, Northern Cardinal, European Starling, Gray Catbird and Carolina Chickadee
California: Chestnut-backed Chickadee, California Towhee, Anna’s Hummingbird, American Crow and Dark-eyed Junco
Oregon: American Robin, House Finch, Anna’s Hummingbird and Chestnut-backed Chickadee
The next 15 species represented 25 — 38% of all identifications, and the remaining species made up 3 - 10% of all identifications.
Haikubox owners can see a list of all species identified in their yards, along with a bar chart showing the daily counts during the past year, at the Listen website or with the Haikubox smartphone app.