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Buckeye Beat: Nature Cams at the Cleveland Metroparks

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- Metroparks has always been very special to me, and I saw a little tiny article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that said the Cleveland Metro Parks is looking for volunteers for their bird banding project. And I though, oh, that sounds interesting. That's something I could do. I didn't realize at the time how hooked I'd be. Before we take out the old card, we check to see how many pictures it's taken.

- As manager of field research, I manage all of the monitoring data that we collect, which is designed to help us make decisions about management in the parks. We have a large number of cameras, which capture animals moving in the parks night and day, and so we have a small army of citizen scientists. They go out and help us get the data cards out of the cameras.

- Then it's ready to capture wildlife pictures again.

- And then we bring that up, and we put it up on a special crowd-sourcing site, called Zooniverse. Then we get help from a much larger army of volunteers to help identify what's in the images, and that's how we get the species information.

- Here's the screech owl. Kind of hard to see, but the shape and the eye reflection and the way it's sitting, you can tell it's a screech owl. I was really anxious to see what kind of pictures we were getting, you know, on the cameras that I was servicing. So, it has been fun. And it's so interesting to see who comes and goes. It's in the shadow, but you can tell it's a hummingbird. It looks bigger because it's close to the camera. I get out in the parks and walk a lot. And this way, rather than just it being my own observation, I get to share it, and have it mean something.