Over 723 million bird song and call recordings have been made by Haikuboxes since 2021.
This is an awfully big number, but we shouldn't be surprised: during the busy spring and summer, each Haikubox can gather more than 3,000 recordings per day, or about 1 million per year. As more Haikuboxes come online each year, the number of recordings will continue to grow.
The graph above shows not only the growth in the number of Haikuboxes since 2021, but how data aggregation can produce meaningful information.
The smaller bump in June 2023 shows the peak of the spring vocalization season, when Haikuboxes collected about 1 million recordings per day. The number of recordings tapers off until the low point in November and December, with the lowest number of bird identifications/recordings coming on December 18 when there were just 400,000.
With the number of Haikuboxes growing after this point (it made a lovely 2023 holiday gift), the swing up to the peak is much steeper and reaches a much higher level in spring 2024. May 17 was the single biggest day for bird recordings, topping out at 3.7 million on that one day. You can see that bird vocalizations quickly started to decline, with data reported through mid-July 2024.
This graph is made by plotting one number -- the total daily count of bird recordings made by Haikuboxes -- but it reveals an interesting story about bird behavior. It would be easy for a future researcher to dive deeply into these community science data as more Haikuboxes come online and the longitudinal dataset grows. Are there regional differences to the timing of peak birdsong activity? Is the timing changing? What do we learn if the focus is only on certain species? We look forward to working with future scientists seeking answers to these and many other questions.