This program gives the user information about birds sighted from my office window, located in the rural community of Annville, KY, USA! The purpose of this project is completely recreational and serves to aid my education in Python!
Running the Program: To run this program, you will need to run the file Birds_In_My_Window/main.py from the command line.
Essential Packages: In order to run this program correctly, please ensure that all of the packages in the requirements.txt file are installed!
Continuing the Loop: To continue selecting menu options after you've chosen an item, you will need to exit the graph pop-up window. Once you've exited the window, you'll be prompted with more options!
The purpose of this project is to show seasonal bird sighting data for Annville, KY in a simple, straight forward, format while giving the user the ability to choose between different self-explanatory data outputs. These different graphical outputs allow the user to easily see the most and least sighted birds across all seasons (excluding birds not sighted at all), sightings during the warmer months of Spring and Summer, sightings during the colder months of Autumn and Winter, and then all sightings across the four seasons, each in a side-by-side format for easy comparison. Although this is mainly recreational and non-scientific, a variety of information can be gleaned from the various outputs. Below is a list of the most interesting data output by the data views:
- Hardest to Spot: the Pileated Woodpecker (my personal favorite), the Barred Owl, and the Red Headed Woodpecker are the least common birds sighted all year.
- Frequent Flyers: the Robin, the Rusty Blackbird, and the Cardinal are the most common birds sighted all year.
- Fair Weather Friends: the Rusty Blackbird is a fairly uncommon sight in the Spring months as they're still making their leisurely migration back to their Northern homes and become a common sight in the Summer. They're easy to see during Autumn as well, but are starting to head back to warmer climates.
- Snow Birds: the Cardinal, the Crow, and the Carolina Wren are easy to see year round as they're comfortable with cold temperatures and don't migrate at all!
- Rare Sights: the Pileated Woodpecker is a fairly rare bird to spot in the open as they prefer large forests with many dead trees, but can occasionally be spotted in the very rural town of Annville, KY, as the data indicates.
#1: Acquire information regarding the bird sightings in my area from a csv file, stored in local memory, using Pandas read_ functions.
Required Feature Addressed: Read in data from a local csv, excel file, json, or any other file type.
#2: Eliminate unnecessary/confusing information (null values) from the dataset for ease of legibility and maximum clarity. Null values are replaced by zeroes.
Required Feature Addressed: Use built-in pandas or numpy functions to do things like remove 0’s and null values where they don’t belong in your dataset.
#3: Acquire information about the most seen birds, least seen birds, seasonal birds, etc.
Required Feature Addressed: Write custom functions to operate on your data.
#4: Visualize the data to aid in the understanding of the information gathered.
Required Feature Addressed: Make 2 basic plots with matplotlib, seaborn, or any other kind of visualization library that you think looks interesting.
#5: Explanation of information gleaned from the program and subsequent graphical output.
Required Feature Addressed: If using some format other than a notebook, make sure your README explains your project.