22-25 April 2026 
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SQLBits 2026
What Does the Fox Say? Actionable Data From Animal Distress
How a volunteer wildlife rescue network turned messy spreadsheets into a powerful dataset that reshaped wildlife handling, revealing patterns and ethical challenges in unstructured, real-world data.
What do you do when your most valuable dataset wasn’t designed, labeled, or even intended to exist?
In this talk, we’ll share how The Haibulans, a volunteer wildlife rescue network, unintentionally built a high-impact dataset from WhatsApp messages, spreadsheets, and field notes. Originally used for coordination, this informal data revealed spatial and temporal patterns in injuries, urban hazards, and human-wildlife interactions.
We’ll show how manual tagging and analysis led to changes in dispatch strategy, public outreach, and collaboration with city agencies - and explore the ethical challenges of working with emotionally charged, unstructured data.
Gain practical insights into extracting value from messy, real-world data, and learn how meaning can emerge even without a formal model. This talk is especially relevant for anyone navigating the space between fieldwork and data work, where meaning emerges before models.
In this talk, we’ll share how The Haibulans, a volunteer wildlife rescue network, unintentionally built a high-impact dataset from WhatsApp messages, spreadsheets, and field notes. Originally used for coordination, this informal data revealed spatial and temporal patterns in injuries, urban hazards, and human-wildlife interactions.
We’ll show how manual tagging and analysis led to changes in dispatch strategy, public outreach, and collaboration with city agencies - and explore the ethical challenges of working with emotionally charged, unstructured data.
Gain practical insights into extracting value from messy, real-world data, and learn how meaning can emerge even without a formal model. This talk is especially relevant for anyone navigating the space between fieldwork and data work, where meaning emerges before models.