If this is based on bird spotters, I'd say the national bird spotting organizations don't report or watch for the same birds.

The birds remained part of the schengen zone and have freedom of movement :)

Could it be you are selecting birds that are not actually in Europe, let alone native, yet are still listed for some reason, e.g., the wild turkey and california quail?

It makes me question the accuracy of the data if anything, especially since the Black Grouse also exists in places that are not mapped and I don’t see anything that could explain omissions, e.g., what the data is based on and how it is collected. My guess based on inexplicable data points for wild turkeys and california quail is that it’s somehow human logged sightings that are accidentally or either impressively logged.

Indeed! I wasn't even able to change the bird easily. I like the initiative, though. I remember the whole bird migration from Africa to Europe and how it shapes the skies in autumn and spring.

Some of the bird data used is available in https://www.GBIF.org (website + APIs + data dumps) but not all of it.

For a visualization like this, the place to start is probably the most recent monthly data snapshot which is available on AWS/Google/Azure's open data portals: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence-snapshots

e.g. start with a DuckDB query:

   SELECT scientificName, individualCount, year, month, day, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, issue
   FROM read_parquet('s3://gbif-open-data-eu-central-1/occurrence/2026-09-01/occurrence.parquet/*')
   WHERE class = 'Aves';

European swallows migrate to Africa in winter [1], they move through Spain and the middle-east, and a few more adventurous through Italy and Sicily ; and that's why they "bubble up" there first in this view. But you can see that, in the dead of winter, barely any swallow is left in the peninsula.

It would be nice to see the dataset extended to Africa and the middle-east.

[1](swallow migration patterns): https://tbhpartnership.org.uk/news/migration-marvels-part-2-...

As a person who emigrated from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula, birds are not the only ones indeed :)

Most of the German/British tourists seem to come during the summer though, in contrast to the tourist birds who come during winter. Smart of the birds to avoid all the tourists!

Seen a photograph of starlings when the flock takes on the silhouette of a giant bird. I've always been fascinated by that kind of (apparent?) collective intelligence. There's seemingly no leader, but from the interactions of swarms of independent actors emerge (what seems like) a larger mind. Surely we humans exhibit such behavior also, when seen from a certain elevated perspective like statistics.

(Shameless self-plug)

I’ve been working on a far nicer way of appreciating bird detections: https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme

On desktop, I think you have to click on the tiny icon next to the currently visible bird's name ("select new dataset") and pick one from the list that appears on the left side of the screen.

"Real-time" been +seconds for decades at this point, pretty different from the "original" meaning, so "live" having the same treatment doesn't feel that out of place.

To be fair, dead birds don't tend to migrate as much (unless they're helped along and stored in a cooler, if you call that migration).

This is a visualisation of Europe.

Some birds migrate outside Europe.

birds migrate

The admin interface lets you control the birds.

Yes and people don't like them because some want to use them to stop migration.