Every Bird Counts in This Incredibly Detailed Visual Checklist
Data artist Jer Thorp鈥檚 stunning visualization shows every individual counted on a single Brooklyn day.
After months of solitary birdwatching early in the pandemic, artist Jer Thorp jumped at an invitation to take part in the Christmas Bird Count (CBC), 探花精选鈥檚 century-old annual survey. On a chilly day in December 2020, he and other Brooklyn CBC volunteers tallied nearly 50,000 birds.
The number struck him. 鈥淲hat does 50,000 birds look like?鈥 wondered Thorp, who often . He built a computer program to illustrate that, using the even higher tally from the most recent CBC: 51,567 birds from 133 species.
The icons in this vast murmuration correspond to each species鈥 shape and color, which Thorp selected manually after poring over photographs. He fiddled with the code for months until satisfied with the plumpness of duck bellies and the prominence of heron bills, and even tweaked the size and wing position of individual birds to render each data point unique.
Thorp鈥檚 aim is to awaken our appreciation for the creatures themselves. 鈥淲e tend to see a group of birds, and reduce them to a number in our checklist,鈥 he says. 鈥淭he idea is to take those numbers and unpack them again into these delightful little things a lot of us are really deeply in love with.鈥
This story originally ran in the Spring 2023 issue. To receive our print magazine, become a member by .