I wonder why that is? There are no topological features defining these borders. Maybe the data is normalised in some way across countries?
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.
I tried it for birds which I’m certain fly to Europe and also saw nothing. Also, when searching for the species, the image in the little preview was wrong (it was right in the main interface, though).
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';
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!
That never made any sense to me. I also go rather go with the birds north in summer where it is cool and to spain in winter when it is still warm.
Which is also what I said?
But otherwise I do prefer a temperate life. Not too hot, not too cold.
Well, "spain in winter when it is still warm" would not be "when that place is the warmest" in my mind. No foul, no harm though :)
Now that there’s no kid in my household, we do travel more in winter (or whenever).
https://books.google.co.in/books/about/In_a_Flight_of_Starli...
Murmurations. They are local movements in comparison, but no less fascinating.
I’ve been working on a far nicer way of appreciating bird detections: https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme
It's not very fast compared to most things often called "live", so perhaps it's not a great label for this demo viewer, but the goal of the project seems to be to make the data available for research, not so much for this map.