Question 1

What is a Monitoring Station?

Accepted Answer

A Monitoring Station, in this context, is a series of devices in a static location that detect birds, either through video or audio, to give a better understanding of what birds are in the area, when they visit, and where they like to go!

Question 2

How does it work?

Accepted Answer

I use two Bird Feeder Cameras (Soliom and Bird Buddy) and two Birdweather PUCs for detections. The PUC uses BirdNet's AI to analyze it's recorded "soundscapes" to detect what birds were making noise in that time. It's not perfect, but I can check the recorded audio on any abnormal detections and verify them manually!
Using this data, I create checklists on eBird! Since I can't know for sure how many individuals were detected (1 bird 10x or 10 birds 1x), all species are marked as present with an affixed FC, LLS, or DLS tag in the comments.
FC: Feeder Camera. The following number denotes how many times this bird appeared in a 20s clip this hour. LLS: Live Listening Station, a static PUC recording 24/7. DLS: Deep Listening Station, a PUC on a tripod that I stash somewhere in Hammock.

Question 3

Why are birds marked as "Present" instead of counting them?

Accepted Answer

By virtue of this being a remote monitoring station, there is no reliable way to tell if a series of detections is a single bird multiple times or multiple birds a single time each. Thus, accurate data on the counts of individual birds is nigh-impossible to obtain.
Instead, the device used to detect the bird is annotated along with any additional context or noteworthy details.
Marking birds as Present does mean that some data is lost, specifically the bird count, but the 24/7 nature of the monitoring station hopefully makes up for it! Present birds still factor into migration tracking, presence, and abundance data!

Question 4

Why do the pictures from your checklists show a yard? Isn't this a Monitoring Station for a park?

Accepted Answer

Short answer: the yard is in Hammock Park.

Long answer: The monitoring station is located on private property inside the borders of Hammock Park. To enter the private property, you first have to enter the park, making it the perfect place for this monitoring station to operate!

Question 5

You used to count how many times a bird was detected, what changed?

Accepted Answer

I used to spend almost 4 hours a day just counting the number of detections made by the Feeder Camera and Live Listening Station, 5-6 if the Deep Listening Station was retrieved and uploaded. The FC averages 400 detections a day, the LLS 1600. 
I realized that data obtained by recording the quantity of detections, most of the time, isn't really worth anything. If there's an abnormal number of detections or if there's any context to be added, I can do so. The difference is that now I have the time to go out and do more of what I love: adventuring and birding!

Question 6

What do all the little symbols mean under the observations?

Accepted Answer

Read the summary's comment! It's too many words to fit in this field.

Hammock Monitoring Station

List of eBird Monitoring Summaries for Hammock Park, Dunedin FL

January

December

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