Map: Baltimore Oriole Sightings in 2022

To celebrate the Baltimore Orioles (the baseball team) winning 100 games in 2023, I made a map of recorded sightings by birdwatchers in the United States by county.

There were over 1 million recorded sightings across the US. This map focuses on the northern and eastern parts of the coutry - the regular summer habitat for Baltimore Orioles.

In the process of analyzing the data, I was surprised by the high number of sightings around Chicago as well as around Boston, compared to the lower number of sightings in the Maryland-area.

It is important to note that the data comes from self reported sightings by birdwatchers. This means that areas with high concentrations of birdwatchers or areas with a small resident population of orioles with a few dedicated birdwatchers could return high numbers of recorded sightings without necessesarily reflecting high Baltimore Oriole population numbers.

This helps explain why counties with urban areas record such high numbers of sightings while counties that are neighboring the cities but are more rural, and may in fact have more suitable oriole habitat, have fewer recorded sightings.

With that being said, the concentration of sightings in the dark orange counties are notable and do likely reflect a higher likelihood of a birdwatcher going out and seeing a Baltimore Oriole.

Happy bird watching and here’s to more sightings of Orioles in the wild and on the diamond.