The purpose of this project is to create a platform to engage people in bird watching. It is particularly targeted towards children, however, I believe anyone of any age can find this hobby enjoyable- its a hoot!
With the success of games like PokemonGo and Animal Crossing, I began to question why more children weren’t interested in birdwatching. If you think about it, these three activities are, at their core, very similar. I believe the time to engage people in a hobby like this, and get people interested in the environment overall is now. And rather than waiting for people to see my passion the way I do, I want to present it in a way that really engages them and meets them where they’re at.
#Tech/Framework This project uses Javascript’s react framework. It also uses the ebird api to show users which bird species are currently being spotted in their area. The intuition behind this approach is that, these are the birds the users themselves are most likely to encounter.
#Contribute At this time, I am not seeking out contributors. This project will need many in the future, and anyone interested can email me at rossjcarnegie@gmail.com to be be updated on when they can help. At the moment, the project is in its early stages and I’d like to flesh it out a bit more so that future contributors will have a clear idea of where this is going. There is somewhere between 860-1100 bird species in the United States. This project will require I provide information on all of them. As it expands to a more global audience, I eventually envision having information on all bird species- which is somewhere around 10,000.
I’ve included an example of the artwork, with the alternative possible name for this project WAZO. It’s a work in progress but it gives a general example of the style these birds will be presented in. You might find it interesting to know that these were created using filters and free-use publicly available images of real birds. The process is generally the same, make the eyes bigger, add back feathers if necessary once the background is clipped out and the filters are run. Give the bird an outline. And that's really it. It's so easy, that I hope to eventually allow users to submit their own sightings and transform them into cartoons like these ones. I’ve been asked about the osprey (top right in particular), if it is some kind of Pokemon or if I intentionally made it look like a Pokemon. Although these pictures had minimal touch ups- this bird is the one I touched up the least. I just made the eye bigger and used a few filters on it.
