Introducing CamClickr!

Innovative online game to organize seven million NestCam photos

By Tina Phillips and Kitty Gifford

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s nest cams have been clicking away for nine years, thrilling online viewers with intimate glimpses into the lives of nesting birds. Each camera adds a new image every 20 to 30 seconds, leaving the Lab with seven million photos of enormous scientific potential—if only they could be sorted to provide a searchable database. That’s why the Lab developed an innovative tool that will make it fun for anyone, young or old, experienced or a novice, to help us organize them all and, in the process, observe fascinating nest behaviors, some perhaps never witnessed before.

Called CamClickr, the new project was inspired by popular online photo organizing tools such as Flickr and Photobucket, which allow you to upload and organize your photos into albums and make them searchable by describing them with tags.

CamClickr takes it a step further, using basic gaming technology to provide a friendly spirit of competition. In Level 1, the participant receives one point for each image sorted into an album (e.g., eggs, nestlings, or adults). After participants sort 99 images, they can move on to Level 2 and earn four points for every tagged image. The challenge in Level 2 is to classify each image with behavioral tags such as feeding young, preening mates, and incubating or rotating eggs.

Behind the game-like interface is a citizen-science project asking scientific questions that can only be answered by viewing life inside a nest. For example, during the egg-laying phase we can ask, “How do parents allocate their time in the nest?” During incubation, a central question is, “Does the rate of egg rotation change during the course of incubation?” And during the nestling phase, scientists are very interested in knowing “What is the relative frequency of feeding by males and females and how does this change as a function of time of day and age of young?” Finding answers to these questions will add to our overall understanding of evolutionary life history traits and help explain the basic strategies that birds use to survive and reproduce.

As with any citizen-science project, CamClickr also has educational objectives for its participants. Most important is to increase understanding of the breeding biology of birds. The site provides an interactive behavioral glossary, high-definition footage of nesting behaviors, and other online tutorials. Future plans include providing animal behavior lesson plans for educators and consensus tools so participants can compare their results with others.

CamClickr is scheduled to launch a beta test this spring on the new NestCams web site at www.nestcams.org. The engaging format should appeal to all audiences, including those whose first language is not English. Regardless of age or skill level, participants can discover something new, join a novel collaborative research project, engage in friendly competition, and share observations with others. In the process, learning about breeding behaviors online may also motivate participants to observe these behaviors in the natural world.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology wishes to acknowledge the National Science Foundation for its support of this project. We are also indebted to the Lab’s technology team for developing this innovative project.

Tina Phillips is project leader of NestWatch. Kitty Gifford is project assistant.

NestCams Need Your Help

NestCams provide intimate looks at nesting birds that inspire viewers to learn more about birds and how to protect them. Please consider sponsoring a nest cam. Individuals, $10 to $3,600; Corporate Sponsorship, $5,000. See www.nestcams.org for details.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu