Hear the sounds of spring in your area

An interactive story that played a preview of migratory bird song from February through May in the reader’s county

Concept, research, and writing by Alyssa Fowers; audio and front-end development by Leslie Shapiro; illustrations by Emily Eng

I dreamed this story up in the depths of winter, when I couldn’t wait to hear the birds announce the return of sun and warmth. I used bird-sighting lists from eBird to determine the 5 most common migratory birds in each county in the contiguous U.S. Then, Leslie Shapiro cleaned and stitched together audio from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Ornithology Lab.

Leslie visualized the pitch of each bird’s song over the course of spring, and created a bar-chart-like figure that would show which birds showed up when.

Concept sketches

My initial (and somewhat embarassing) concept sketch for the bird bar chart: