Woodpeckers and Squirrels and Whatnot

    I fell off with my volunteer hours when the pandemic hit, so this past year I knew I needed to find something to do consistently to make up my last batch. I wasn't sure what I was going to do until one of my teachers, Aaron told me about Citizen Science through Zooniverse. This appealed to me because it was hard to find dedicated time to do volunteering, but through Zooniverse I could do it any time of day or week. I was able to complete my hours in lots of random patches, with a particularly concentrated effort when everyone else in my house got COVID over winter break. There are a lot of things people can do through Zooniverse, like transcribing old documents or identifying various things like genes, animals, and weather patterns. I ended up doing my work identifying Woodpeckers for the Minneapolis Audubon Chapter's work at the Cedar Creek reserve. There are two types of classification available for this project. Originally I did most of my work on identifying which videos of woodpecker cavities had a woodpecker. This meant spending a lot of time watching clips about 10 seconds long and identifying what is in the videos. The camera is set off by any motion, so usually it ended up being a squirrel but occasionally there would be a person walking through the woods, a different type of bird, or just the wind moving the branches around. The videos identified as having a woodpecker were then routed to the other part of the project, where volunteers identify how old the woodpecker in the video probably is, how many are in the video, and what they are doing. Before this I had not put a lot of thought into all the different things birds can be doing, but in fact they live vivid lives of entering and exiting their homes, sitting near their homes, flying, vocalizing, carrying things, and interacting with other animals around them. Next volunteers are also asked if the woodpecker is wearing a colored band in the video and what color it is. There is not much information about the bands but since this is on a nature preserve I assume the scientists use them to tag the woodpeckers based on certain criteria I am not privy to. 

Dr. Elena West and team, Zooniverse, 2019

I am not sure how to cite motion capture cameras but this is an example of footage caught of a squirrel

Here is an example of what a clip with a woodpecker may look like, though typically there is only one.