Whitman Field Station Nº 001 · 34.03° N, 84.15° W
The Back Forty Wildlife Report
Heard in the yard
MICROPHONE · LAST 24 HOURSSeen in the yard
CAMERA · MOST RECENTThe camera is watching. Nothing has walked past yet.
A 180° camera went live on July 28. It watches the yard continuously and a computer on the network checks every frame for animals — deer, fox, raccoon, opossum, skunk, rabbit, squirrel. The first one to cross appears here on its own, day or night. People are never tracked and never recorded.
Every bird ever heard
MICROPHONE · ALL TIMEEvery card here has audio. Click one to hear the recording.
Every creature ever seen
CAMERA · ALL TIMENothing on film yet.
Once the camera is up, every species it identifies will keep one card here — the first good portrait of each, kept for good.
Patterns in the yard
EVERYTHING THE STATION HAS LEARNEDWhat the camera looks for and never finds
The detector is trained on twelve animals. Absence here is not proof of absence in the yard — a squirrel is small and fast and may simply be invisible to it — but a gap this large is worth showing.
The day in the yard
When each species actually sings, summed over every day the microphone has been listening. Midnight at the left, midnight at the right.
The life list, as it grew
Every species the first time it was heard. The curve flattening is how you know the yard has been mostly catalogued.
Weather and activity
Detections per day against the yard's own temperature and rainfall. Too few days yet to claim a pattern — this is the record starting, not a finding.
Conditions in the yard
WEATHER STATION · EVERY MINUTEAn Ecowitt station in the yard reports every minute: a WS90 on a pole for rain, sun and wind, and a shaded sensor on the screen porch for the air the birds are actually in. The wind here blows out of the west almost all the time and reaches the sensor before it reaches the house; an easterly, which is rare, comes around the house first. A dash means that sensor has not been heard from; it never gets drawn as zero. The air temperature here is the same number the insect chorus below uses to turn pulse rate into a species.
The night chorus
INSECTS · EVERY 5 MINUTESThe porch mic is sampled for 20 seconds every five minutes. No model is involved: this is the energy between 4 and 10 kHz, where crickets and katydids sing, plus the loudest pitch and how fast it pulses. Pitch shifts mean a different species has taken over; pulse rate rises with temperature. How this works. Reference measurements and specimen photographs come from Singing Insects of North America, T. J. Walker, University of Florida. Species are filtered to those occurring in the north Georgia piedmont.