The Big Yard: Birdwatching in a Time of Quarantine

Or: The Evolution of a Lister

A new bird for the yard, the Vermillion Flycatcher, checks out the locals.

Day 115 of the Quarantine (July 6, 2020)

            One hundred days of continuous daily posts on eBird.  But not 100 birds—yet.  The recent first-ever-for-the-yard (FEY), vermillion flycatcher checked in at 97. 

My temperature is also 97…97 degrees F.  I take it every day with a Kinsa thermometer I ordered online after hearing about it on NPR.  The thermometer works with an app you download onto your smartphone and the measurements are recorded and uploaded anonymously to a central database.  Almost as good as a Bill Gates’ microchip implant! 

            Kinsa's mission is to stop the spread of contagious illness through early detection and response.  It does this by tracking and predicting infections across the U.S. in real time, every time someone uses a Kinsa thermometer and logs in the reading.  This way, the company—whose data is available from their website to anyone—can stay on top of the flu season, and in this case, the coronavirus outbreak, in greater geographic detail than public health officials. 

            Just by mapping people’s temperatures.

            Kinsa has documented spikes as much as nine days before people started testing positive for Covid-19, largely because it may take that long to see a doctor and get test results. “We get to see when someone gets sick,” says Kinsa CEO, Inder Singh, “but perhaps never enters the health care system because they don't get sick enough.”

            On May 29, two weeks after Arizona reopened its economy, Kinsa showed higher than expected levels of transmission.  Social distancing had been working, and the Kinsa thermometer was one of the first data sources to prove it.

“It showed that people's sacrifices at home were working,” Singh says. “People should know that they were helping to save others’ lives.”

            Currently, Kinsa has exposed Arizona as a Covid hotspot.

Kinsa unleashes my inner nerd. This is community science. Like eBird and iNaturalist, two other portals I use to contribute to science by sharing my nature sightings and photographs.  For example, when I started reporting on eBird the presence of brown-headed cowbirds in my yard last month, I contributed to a color-coded map of the birds’ seasonal abundance in North America.  The tiny orange dot in southeast Arizona is my yard. 

A male Brown-headed Cowbird. Females lay up to 60 eggs a year—in the nests of other birds, leaving other birds to raise their young.

Similar to eBird but broader in scope, iNaturalist also focuses on education, research, conservation, invasive species, climate change, and biodiversity across the world. You don’t have to be an expert.  When I upload from my phone a photo of an unfamiliar cactus or snake, a whole community of experts and volunteers agree on identifications.  In this way, not only do I learn about the nature around me, but other researchers might use my sightings to study things like the distribution of mountain kingsnakes or red-spotted toads or the occurrence of a new bird for the Mule Mountains.

First Daughter couldn’t do her wildlife camera study on bears without the local community, volunteers who monitor the cameras, hiking miles to change batteries and flash drives, spending long hours entering data into spreadsheets.

Community science asks us to rethink how science is made: Ordinary people helping scientists take the pulse of the planet.

A tarantula takes my pulse as its photo is uploaded to iNaturalist

More “hands-on” science for iNaturalist. A Vinegaroon

What I’ve always called a Sonoran Mountain Kingsnake, iNaturalist experts say has been split into two species based on geography. This one from the Mule Mountains is now a Chihuahuan Mountain Kingsnake (Lampropeltis knoblochi)

The first photographic record of an Elegant Trogon in the Mule Mountains taken from my backyard

            Tonight, as I write these words fever free and tucked into my home, the season’s first common poor-will begins calling, its two-note whistle curling up from the creek bottom to the open window and the measured silence at my desk.  Species number 98! 

It’s a sound to raise my temperature and map me like the cowbirds.

Red-spotted Toads live in some of the hottest and driest deserts and some of the coldest forests throughout Arizona

A Mexican Long-tongued bat, an Arizona species of concern. We have two kinds of nectar-feeding bats that often frequent hummingbird feeders in late summer. The Arizona Game and Fish Department seeks volunteers to monitor their feeders for bat activity. If you would like to learn more or participate in some important community science, see https://www.azgfd.com/wildlife/backyard-bats/

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