Methodology · Flyway

Flyway — early-warning methodology

Flyway is the part of WildlifeStats that aims to detect wildlife events early — before they reach the news cycle. Rehabilitators and naturalists post what they are seeing as it happens: the first hummingbird at a feeder, a sudden run of orphaned nestlings, a storm-driven die-off. Flyway reads those public signals, turns them into structured records, and flags when a pattern is running early, late, or spiking against its historical baseline. This page explains how it works and the rules that govern it.

The signal template

Flyway is built around one reusable unit, a signal definition. Each signal is described by the same four parts, so the same machinery serves many subjects:

• Vocabulary — the phrases people actually post ("first hummingbird," "found a baby bird," "mass die-off").
• Anchor feeds — structured citizen-science sources for the same subject (Journey North, eBird, iNaturalist), which are higher-trust and cleanly geolocated.
• Geography and season window — the resolution (usually county) and the months a signal is expected.
• Trigger logic — the rule that calls a deviation: early, late, or a spike against the rolling baseline.

The first batch defines eight signals — hummingbird and monarch spring arrival, songbird baby-season onset, amphibian breeding, and four hazard signals (avian-influenza die-offs, oiled-bird events, weather-kill events, and migration-season window-strike spikes). The catalog grows by editorial curation.

The pipeline

1. Sources. A curated roster of public wildlife-rehab Pages on Facebook and Instagram, a weekly phrase/hashtag discovery pass to surface new candidate Pages for human review, and the structured anchor feeds.
2. Extraction. Each public post is read by a language model that emits at most one typed record — event type, species, county, date, confidence — and nothing else.
3. Baseline and triggers. Records are compared to a rolling per-signal, per-region baseline. A deviation fires an early / late / spike trigger.
4. Surface. Triggered signals are available to the research tier and, in aggregate, through the WildlifeStats assistant.

Legal posture

Flyway is built to extract signals, not to copy content. The rules:

• No raw post text is stored or republished. The post content is read once to extract a typed record, then discarded. Only the link back to the original post is kept, for attribution.
• No re-syndication of images or video. A signal that rests on visual evidence cites the original post; it does not copy the media.
• Public Pages only. Private Facebook groups are login-walled and off-limits to automation; Flyway uses public Pages and public phrase/hashtag search only.
• Attribution preserved. Every signal record links back to its source post.
• Take-down on request. Any organization can ask to be removed from the Flyway roster; its entry is removed within five business days and its historical extracted records are scrubbed.

Flyway is in development. The signal catalog and source registry are in place; the recurring scrape is disabled until explicitly authorized, and structured citizen-science feeds are the primary, highest-trust layer. The assistant is WREN; it answers questions against Flyway's signals once they are flowing.