It was a good deal larger than this in the morning. I stuck the phone into the fridge to slow down whatever reaction is going on (which made it shrink back to this state); getting a battery replacement tomorrow ><
TLDR: you select a place on the map, and it shows you what the animals there are currently doing - depending on season, time of day, and weather.
Why? Because I thought it'd be neat (and that it would be wayyyyy easier). I spent spring in a temperate climate for the first time in ages this year, and was reminded how cool it is how nature adapts and springs into action as it gets warmer. I guess I wanted something to stay connected to that after I return to the tropics?
Is it useful? Nah. But maybe I'll add berry & mushroom seasons in the future!
How? I used the iNaturalist API to get distributions & timings for the most-observed mammals, birds etc for each H3 res=2 hexagon; and augmented that with information parsed from the corresponding Wikipedia articles. The images weren't possible to automate without risking including images of dead animals, so those are all hand picked. (yep I spent days just choosing images one after the other for thousands of species...)
So far it has 9200 events for 3500 species; I still have a list of a total of 19000 animals to go through, and want to expand it to plants, mushrooms, astronomical events... Later.
Kind of considering adding matching soundscapes, like jungle or rain noises, depending on the selected location and its weather... But that's gonna be a whole thing.
So far it shows 1700 visitors last week (although a good fraction of those are probably bots, this is from the cloudflare analytics, I don't set cookies). Two kind souls even donated already, enough for this year's domain name cost <3
But currently I'm a bit stuck on how to get the word out some more, if I already did the work I want people to enjoy it! Trying with an Instagram account rn, but I guess Insta is way more addictive than my site, unlikely to get many people from there...
RSD go brrrrrr