10 March 07
Semantic Magpies
Spring has come along (high in the 70s F today), and I’m back to surveying our grid square for the Solano County Breeding Bird Atlas project. My goal now is to start confirming breeding in species on the grid square that I’ve already observed there. One of today’s targets was the yellow-billed magpie; heading past a ranch house I observed one flying and disappearing into a nest I think carrying an insect. Does that count as a confirmed instance of breeding? Or is it not quite enough evidence?
Meanwhile, several colleagues of mine working on our semantic web project have gotten interested in ‘semantic eco-blogging’, the idea being to supplement blogged nature observations with data that can be interpreted by machines. Their testbed blog for this is FieldMarking. The file here is an example of the data format we’re testing; it describes the magpie observation above.
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Good luck with the magpies — did you know I studied black-billed magpies in Korea? A few years ago I spent a number of afternoons trying to confirm breeding of fish crows for a Breeding Bird Atlas grid square here in Maryland. They were certainly acting suspicious but I was never able to catch them definitively. So frustrating! I’m not familiar with atlas standards, but I think your sighting indicates breeding. Corvids don’t usually hang out at nests otherwise (unlike some other bird spp).