My devoted readers may recall my fondness for number crunching (a habit formed by 24 years' in market research, perhaps). I have been remiss in undertaking any on these pages for some time. Well, I got the bug again and have been scrutinizing my BirdCam logbook. I've collected enough data (31 months' worth) to start seeing long term trends, and here's a look at my BirdCam photo counts averaged for month and day. Hence, in my typical year I see the most photos per day in January (about 140) and the least in September (about 30). The actual data are plotted in green. Ideally, this suggests a nominal function shown in red, with progressively fewer photos through spring and summer, and an uptick in late autumn as we return to the cold time. But there are anomalies. You'll notice a spike upwards in April and May: that's the impact of heavier feeder traffic due to the presence of fledglings. But August...leaves me baffled. In both 2008 and 2009 I experienced sharp increases in photo counts on multiple days, yet this is a time when feeder traffic ought to be low due to easy-to-obtain natural foods. Plainly, I am going to need to do some intense research on August to see what might be going on. The beauty of data: one question only leads to another...
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Number Crunching, Again
My devoted readers may recall my fondness for number crunching (a habit formed by 24 years' in market research, perhaps). I have been remiss in undertaking any on these pages for some time. Well, I got the bug again and have been scrutinizing my BirdCam logbook. I've collected enough data (31 months' worth) to start seeing long term trends, and here's a look at my BirdCam photo counts averaged for month and day. Hence, in my typical year I see the most photos per day in January (about 140) and the least in September (about 30). The actual data are plotted in green. Ideally, this suggests a nominal function shown in red, with progressively fewer photos through spring and summer, and an uptick in late autumn as we return to the cold time. But there are anomalies. You'll notice a spike upwards in April and May: that's the impact of heavier feeder traffic due to the presence of fledglings. But August...leaves me baffled. In both 2008 and 2009 I experienced sharp increases in photo counts on multiple days, yet this is a time when feeder traffic ought to be low due to easy-to-obtain natural foods. Plainly, I am going to need to do some intense research on August to see what might be going on. The beauty of data: one question only leads to another...
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