AudubonIslandBirdSurvey07082026CWMavic3Dusk

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, reddish egret, herring gull, laughing gull, ring-billed gull, sandwich tern, royal tern, pigeon, hooded merganser, white pelican, ruddy turnstone, American oystercatcher, willet and brown booby in the video. 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 Mavic 3 Pro flew ~1km from Sulphur Point to Audubon Island on a programmed flight prepared with the free software-as-a-service waypointmap.com at ~15m/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 60 frames per second (fps). Within ~200m of Audubon Island, the drone slows to ~8m/s speed, ascends to ~25m and circles sideways, counterclockwise (CCW) 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. The 3X optical zoom lens is selected and the drone proceeds on a manually operated, sideways CCW flight around the perimeter of the island at ~1m/s speed and ~3m altitude using a DJI RC Pro 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 5° down angle while filming 4K video at 60fps. The DJI Mavic 3 Pro completes a round trip flight and survey of Audubon Island in ~30 minutes and accumulates ~35GB 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 ~30 minute video with iMovie video editing software. Audubon Island Bird Survey dazzle videography records the island during the golden hour with a DJI Mavic 3 Pro equipped with an optical zoom lens positioned at a low angle to amplify image compression, magnify parallax displacement and enhance the dramatic effect of sunrise on Audubon Island. Be a citizen scientist! Count the birds and add your numbers to the tally by reporting your observations in the video comments. Thank you for watching the video and contributing your observations!