Project: NL and TW birds

I wanted a website that shows birds who appear in both the Netherlands and Taiwan, and whether I’ve seen them (link to project).¹ I’m happy I had an idea and was able to execute the idea :D

The lists

I used the Lijst van Nederlandse vogelsoorten from the Dutch Birding Association, and the 2023年臺灣鳥類名錄 from the Taiwan Wild Bird Federation to compile a list of birds that appeared in both countries. The data processing was done in Excel using =IF(ISERROR(MATCH(A1,$C$1:$C$714,0)),"",A1) to compare columns. This was done with both the English and scientific names, then fixing discrepancies between the two (e.g. English names differed on the apostrophes used, grey vs gray, apostrophes), deferring to the Dutch list.²

In hindsight, I could have used Avibase’s compare regions function. Although their list has a few more birds than mine (290 vs 281). Some of the birds on the Avibase list don’t appear on the lists I used³, some on my list don’t appear on the Avibase list.⁴

I wasn’t sure what to do with subspecies. Sometimes Taiwan and the Netherlands had the same subspecies (e.g. Tree pipit - Anthus trivialis trivialis), whereas sometimes there was no overlap (e.g. Eurasian whimbrel Numenius phaeopus - nl: N. p. phaeopus, N. p. islandicus - tw: N. p. variegatus, N. p. hudsonicus. Also while we’re here, N. p. hudsonicus has been split off into its own species and doesn’t even belong in this discussion!)

The Excel (which looks similar to this checklist version I made) was then converted to JSON using https://csvjson.com, so that each bird looked like this:

{
    "Dutch": "Grote Pieper",
    "English": "Richard’s Pipit",
    "Chinese": "大花鷚",
    "Scientific": "Anthus richardi",
    "Alternative name": "",
    "Alternative scientific name": "",
    "Notes": ""
}

Flickr API

The JSON was then populated with bird photo URLs from Flickr using its API search method. I was fiddling around with different license arguments, but ended up only grabbing photos under CC BY 2.0 license.

Not all birds returned a picture, and not all pictures returned were great, so some manual search and selection was done too.

The JavaScript

I’ve never used data from JSON to populate a page before. I found this Medium article useful. Note that Firefox threw an “Uncaught SyntaxError: import assertions are not currently supported” when I used import so I fetch()ed the JSON instead.