The Audubon Island Bird Survey is a citizen scientist initiative established to collect and analyze timely and verifiable drone videography and photography to reveal the habits, patterns and dynamics of the birds that use Audubon Island as a rest, roost or rookery.
Watch and enjoy the video! Be a citizen scientist! Count the birds and add your numbers to the tally by reporting your observations in the video comments.
You may see brown pelican, double-crested cormorant, little blue heron, great blue heron, snowy egret, great egret, herring gull, laughing gull, sandwich tern, royal tern, pigeon, hooded merganser and brown booby in the video.
The Audubon Island west rookery is about three times larger than the east rookery and most adult brown pelicans in both rookeries are brooding. East rookery brown pelican chicks have been hatching. West rookery brown pelican chicks have begun hatching. The adult laughing gulls are in large numbers across Audubon Island and they’re courting, mating and nesting at numerous locations. An increasingly large number of adult royal terns have established a rookery southwest of the east brown pelican rookery where they’re courting, mating and nesting.
Thank you for watching the video and contributing your observations!
Audubon Island is located in St. Andrew Bay just west of the Port of Panama City, Florida at Dyers Point. Audubon Island was created from dredge spoil in the late 1960s and is owned by the State of Florida. The Florida Governor and Cabinet declared Audubon Island a Wilderness Area in 1975. Audubon Island was restored to less than an acre in the late 1990s with additional dredge spoil, protected by a perimeter reinforced with a ring of rip rap, before it nearly submerged and disappeared because of weather and erosion.
Drone flights start and end ~1km north of Audubon Island near the east end of the Hathaway Bridge at Sulphur Point. For this survey, a DJI Mini 4 Pro flew ~1km from Sulphur Point to Audubon Island on a programmed flight prepared with the free software-as-a-service waypointmap.com at ~12m/s speed and ~6m altitude. The autofocus camera was set for -0.3 exposure value (EV) and at a 15° down angle while filming 4K video at 30 frames per second (fps).
Within ~200m of Audubon Island, the drone slows to ~8m/s speed, ascends to ~25m and circles sideways, clockwise (CW) around the island twice, while the camera remains pointed at the island. The drone descends to ~5m altitude during the second revolution and stops at a position near the northeast corner of the island before proceeding on a manually operated CW overlapping Archimedean spiral flight path around the entire island at ~1m/s speed and ~5m altitude using a DJI RC 2 remote controller to direct the drone and keep the camera pointed at the island for the remainder of the survey. The autofocus camera was set for -0.3EV and at a 25° down angle while filming 4K video at 30fps.
The DJI Mini 4 Pro completes a roundtrip flight and survey of Audubon Island in ~25 minutes and accumulates ~20GB of video footage in multiple ~3.75GB video clips stored on a removable SanDisk 256GB Pro microSDXC UHS-1 memory card carried inside the drone. The video clips are copied to a 27-inch, 3.3GHz, 6-Core Intel Core i5 iMac with AMD Radeon Pro 5300 4GB graphics, 8GB 2667MHz DDR4 memory as well as 500GB storage and assembled into a continuous ~25 minute video with iMovie video editing software.
The CW video as well as the counterclockwise (CCW) video are made consecutively on the same day during each survey event and are used to manually count and verify bird numbers for that survey.
A third video is created for each survey event by combining the optimum clips from the individual CW and CCW video surveys obtained by the DJI Mini 4 Pro into a single video using iMovie video editing software to satisfy Polycam photogrammetric software video input requirements (less than 16GB and less than 30 minutes).
Poly.cam is a fee-based photogrammetric software-as-a-service that selects frames from a video input and processes them as still photographs to produce an improperly scaled and ungeoreferenced 3D model. The 3D model can be rescaled and as such is useful for locating birds and nests, approximating rookery area, calculating species density, verifying bird counts as well as monitoring chick development and fledgling success.
Checkout the 3D model! Watch and enjoy the video! Be a citizen scientist! Count the birds and add your numbers to the tally by reporting your observations in the video comments.
Monday, May 12, 2025 Audubon Island Bird Survey Polycam 3D model
Thank you for watching the video, checking out the 3D model and contributing your observations!
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