Welcome to Condor Watch!
Hi and thank you for participating in Condor Watch! We are very excited about our project and hope you will be too. California condors are one of the rarest birds on earth and through Condor Watch we hope you will get know our California flock. We are going to analyze data that Condor Watch provides on which birds hang out together alongside all the data we have compiled on how often these birds are lead poisoned to see if we can identify social behaviors that might put a condor at greater risk for lead poisoning. In addition to the lead exposure question, we hope Condor Watch will more broadly increase our understanding of the flock’s social structure (we considered calling the site “Condor Facebook”) and how an individual bird’s place in the flock relates to its space use, breeding behavior, and exposure to other contaminants. Someone from the science team will be posting blogs and monitoring the discussion page regularly – so please let us know if you have questions about our project and do tag photos where you see something interesting.
Over the next few months, we will be posting blogs from each member of the Science Team so that you can get to know us a little better. We are excited to have you join us – we hope you enjoy watching condors as much as we do!
The Science Team.
Condor Watch 
Cool! I’d like a back button when on the overview of marked animals, because I keep clicking on that Done button as if it was the “Done with this mark, next mark…. o oops”-button because it is in roughly the same location and color. Also a reminder when marking 0 carcasses would be nice because that only happens in night pictures. And in the fieldguide I’d like more examples of what do you mean with underline and when to tag it as underline?
Ah Tip: first mark all animals, but don’t answer all the questions about the marks. Then a red dot appears and thus you can’t accidentally next the image.
And what is in case of poisoning frequency the difference between occasionally and rarely?
and in the overview of bio’s if there are more then 10 – 14 (depending on screen width) condors the bio links do not fit all on screen anymore.
What does scale mean as in “carcasses / scale”? I’m non-native english. A scale is something to weigh someone/something with. Or a scale can be a size measurement, but I can’t supply you with any size measurement, just dots. Maybe look at how seafloor explorer lets us mark the size of scallops/fish/etc to mark the scale of a carcass?
Some of the photos have a scale in them that you can see. So that is why carcass/scale is there. Thank you for participating and I hope you are having fun. We will post a blog soon about what the poisoning rates mean.
Myra
thank you for the feedback! For underline, some of the condor tag numbers are underlined, some have dots, some do not have anything under them. We can see about a back button – I will pass that along.
Myra
I have also accidentally hit the “all animals marked” button several times after hitting “done” for one animal. Maybe move the “all animals marked” button to a slightly different place so it’s harder to accidentally double click…
Hi thank you for your comment. We are working with the technical staff to see if we can get a “back” button to help remedy this issue. Myra
Same. But one time I was classifying the intro picture, and there was a red sticker looking thing on one of the condor’s wings, and I tried to move on, but it wouldn’t let me, and I don’t know what to do. Also, on another on, there was a tag marked 43, but instead of dots on the bottom, it was underlined, so I didn’t know what to do. I would really appreciate it if you could help me, because this is an assignment for science. Thanks a million!
~Charlotte
Next time you see a red dot, click on that dot and you should be able to finish the data entry and move on. Also, there is an option to indicate underline instead of dots — it is on the very bottom of the form, to the left of Juvenile|Adult. Thanks a million to you for your help!!
Ok. Thanks!
What are we supposed to do with the night pictures that are completely black?
if you can’t see any animals (in some night pictures you can see things like coyotes), just don’t mark anything and move onto the next picture. Thank you for participating in Condor Watch!
Myra
It’s telling me “Incomplete markings! Check for solid red dots.” There are no red dots, solid or otherwise, on the page I’m viewing. I can’t go any further, and since I see no red dots I don’t know how to resolve the problem.
Hi, thank you for your comment. We have been told this is a technical issue that is being fixed. If you continue to have problems please write back here or on the ‘Talk’ discussion boards under ‘technical issues’. Myra
It seems to be a difficult project and I think it will be the one where you will have only small number of classifiers but who are dedicated in return. What is more prioritized in this project: high fidelity or high accuracy?
We recognize some of the photos are hard to classify, but some are pretty easy! We can do a lot with partial data and also have quality controls in place to help assure accuracy. So we are hoping people try it out and have fun and not worry too much about making a mistake.
Just curious on the data for the other animals — the coyotes, ravens, turkey vultures and golden eagles. Is the project also looking at social interactions between condors and these other animals, or is there a plan for other use for the data collected for those animals? Just wondering why that information is being collected.
I’ll also second the idea of allowing classifiers to back out and continue if they inadvertently click the finished button on a photo.
Great project, I hope some good results come out of it and like some other Zooniverse projects maybe some future projects could develop out of these photos!
thank you! we are glad you like the project. The current primary goal is to look at social interactions of condors with each other but we also thought it was important to gather data on the other animals to see how condors interact with them as well as the proportion of time these other animals spend at the feeding stations. Currently there are no data compiled on how many other animals (turkey vultures, raves, etc.) use the stations and how often compared to condors.
We are working on getting a ‘back’ button so that classifiers can continue – hopefully this will be implemented soon. thank you again for your participation!
I’m really psyched to help with this, but 2 technical issues:
– When using Chrome browser, I can’t sign in, although I can with Explorer.
– I’m getting “Incomplete markings! Check for solid red dots.” on areas of the photo that aren’t choices listed (ie, grass/sand areas). Without ID-ing these, I can’t move on to the next photo.
Thanks for your comments – we are working on this issue as other people have had similar problems. Hopefully it will be resolved soon. best, Myra