Condor Watch – the first two weeks

Hi everyone, we have had a great first two weeks!  We are already about 3% done with the classifications, have had over 100,000 page views and lots of great discussions about the photos and condors.

Some fun finds in the photos:

Black bears, mountain lions and bobcats!

And then of course condors, lots of condors!

We wanted everyone to know we are listening to the feedback from these first two weeks and are working on making the site more fun.  A few of the things we are working on:

1) The ravens!  We are aware that marking a photo with 20+ ravens is tiresome and we are making changes to the site to make this process quicker.

2) ‘Other’ option – we are working on a way to help guide how to mark other animals (such as black bears!) in the photos.  We are very interested in the different species that use the condor feeding stations.

3) The infamous ability to go back. We know that it is frustrating if you click the ‘all animals marked’ option but are not done and can’t go back – we are working on a way to fix this.

4) The mis IDs. A mis ID is when you put in a tag number but the condor bio comes up as unidentified or a bird that died before the photo was taken (nicknamed ‘zombie condors’): We (actually Vickie Bakker, our data matron extraordinaire) is spending an enormous amount of time checking those mis IDs that are reported and ferreting out why. We have fixed some of the major issues but please do continue to report the mis IDs you see so we can try and fix them all!  We have started a discussion board for people to post their mis-IDs, under “Science Board”, “The Objects” and titled: “Unknown’ Numbers -=- list ’em here – check if already listed”. Also, be assured that even though the ID might have come up “unknown” on the site, we can go back and cross reference this to be able to identify these birds for our research purposes. So, although it is not as satisfying for you, valuable data are still being generated.

So, we want to send a huge thank you to the Zooniverse community for participating in Condor Watch and know that we are working on sorting out these last few details to make this an even more fun and fabulous project!  We do monitor the discussion boards regularly so let us know what you think!

The Science Team