Spotting Bird Spotters

The Dutch site Waarneming.nl is a fantastic resource, avidly used by animal spotters of every kind imaginable. Its user-base is tremendous and in total more than 23 billion sightings are currentlyon record. I was just wondering if I could use some of that data and lacking an API I wrote a little screen scraper that collects name, date and GPS coordinates. I will never be able to collect it all (even if I wanted to) for the simple reason that Waarneming.nl grows faster than I can scrape it. Bloody hell!

As a bit of hobby I wrote an online-map page that shows snapshots of data and can show the geographic distribution of a large number of birdspecies. It won't shatter the earth but here are some screenshots of things I saw.

Somebody spotting birds and plant on a bike?

Cetti's zanger: a very specific habitat.

Great tit/Koolmees, very common but only 330+ sightings.

The raven.