Tuesday, February 17, 2015

More Secret Lives of Cats


Two years ago the BBC screened a documentary called The Secret Life of Cats. In the programme they attached GPS trackers and micro-cameras to a number of domestic cats in an English village.

To accompany the television show the BBC published ten Ordnance Survey maps showing the tracks of ten of the featured the cats over a 24 hour period. Each of the maps is accompanied by a small film clip of the particular tracked cat in action and a summary about how far each cat roams from its home and the size of its roaming area.


Thanks to Movebank, an online database of animal tracking data, a number of other cats have also had their movements mapped. Andrew Hill of CartoDB has taking the data for one of the cats tracked on Movebank and mapped out his movements over one week.

The Spencer the Cat map shows Spencer's movements on top of a stylized map. If you want you can also see his tracks overlaid on top of a satellite view in this map.

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