Duck, Duck, Goose?

An anatidaephobic’s guide to the state of New York

Some people are afraid of ducks and geese, and I don’t blame them. They are horrifying little honkers. Thankfully, with the help of the crowdsourced Ebird dataset maintained by Cornell University, we can learn more about where these menaces are most often seen so they can be properly avoided.

You’re not crazy, it is getting worse!

As you can see in figure 1 below, the number of spottings of these birds are on the rise. If this pattern continues, we will soon be inundated with human-goose conflict.

## `summarise()` has grouped output by 'name'. You can override using the
## `.groups` argument.

We can compare the geographical distributions of ducks and geese, note the overlap in distributions

It appears there are regions, including near NYC, where many of these birds are seen. 

ggplot(tidyDuckGoose_filt, aes(x=species, fill = name)) + 
  geom_bar() + 
  theme_classic() +
  # scale_color_npg() +
  scale_fill_manual(values = MyPalette) +
  coord_flip() +
  facet_wrap(~bird_type, scales = "free") +
  geom_text(stat='count', aes(label=..count..), vjust=0.5, hjust=0.5, angle = -90) +
  theme(legend.title= element_blank()) +
  ggtitle("Number of each species identified in the data")

## `summarise()` has grouped output by 'name'. You can override using the
## `.groups` argument.

As we can see, geese are omnipresent. However, July does seem to be the best time for avoiding seeing ducks and geese in general.

Broken down by year, we can see that this trend is conserved, but sightings are rapdily increasing.

## `summarise()` has grouped output by 'name', 'month'. You can override using the
## `.groups` argument.