The View from Sapsucker Woods

Since the early 1930s, scientists at the Lab of Ornithology have been fascinated by natural sounds. With financial and technical help from New York stockbroker Albert Brand, and volunteer help from Cornell undergraduate Peter Keane, Arthur Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg used motion-picture sound film to collect some of the world's earliest and most famous recordings of endangered birds. Technical innovations in sound recording and acoustic analysis proceeded virtually nonstop for 75 years, and now the Lab is engaged in historic acoustic research that would have seemed like science fiction to Allen and Kellogg. This work is revolutionizing how humans monitor the natural world to help conserve biodiversity.

The Lab's "acoustics-for-conservation" research began when Christopher Clark first dropped hydrophones into the Bering Sea to count bowhead whales in the 1980s. Today, acoustic surveys play a major role in assessing whale numbers both in the Arctic and across the high seas. Through the 1990s Clark and his Bioacoustics Research Program teammates engineered new recording devices, storage and retrieval technology, and computer software for automatically detecting and classifying sounds. Field-tested and refined repeatedly over the past decade, this technology has matured into a remarkable system that dramatically improves our abilities to monitor and mitigate the ecological impacts of coastal development on marine mammals.

John W. Fitzpatrick

This fall a unique array of acoustic devices is being deployed offshore east of Boston Harbor and in the Gulf of Maine to record underwater sounds and send them to surface buoys. There, acoustic recognition software singles out any signal resembling the contact call of the northern right whale, one of the most endangered marine mammals in the world. Signals classified as "likely" or "highly likely" are sent by cell or satellite back to Cornell for detailed analysis. When this historic array is fully deployed and functional in 2008, merchant captains navigating the shipping lanes into and out of Boston will receive real-time warnings and can reduce their speed to below the danger levels for large whales. Demographic studies show that saving just one or two females a year from dying by collision with ships would cause the northern right whale population to rebound. The power of acoustic monitoring arrays to reduce ship-whale collisions along the world's coastlines has brought the work of Chris Clark and his research team to the attention of both industry and the conservation community. This is genuine breakthrough technology in conservation management, with potential for globally scaled impact.

The Bioacoustics Research Program is also developing closely-related technology on land to monitor the night sky across North America. On most clear nights during fall and spring, Doppler weather maps reveal a staggering density of migrating birds. Local weather broadcasters treat these Doppler smears as nuisance ground-clutter, but in fact they represent a gold-mine of information about bird numbers all across the continent. Radar cannot differentiate bird species, but many birds deliver species-specific call notes while migrating. By coupling acoustic and radar technology in a network of installations across the North American landscape, we hope to begin producing colorful, nightly "weather maps" depicting the numbers, identities, and migratory pathways of North American birds. Besides providing standardized data for measuring year-to-year fluctuations in bird numbers, such maps will someday provide every household a chance to appreciate the enormous rivers of birds flowing over our heads each night.

Every moment of every day, the world resounds with the songs of the living world. Throughout its history the Lab has been dedicated to bringing those songs into the hearts and minds of all who listen. Today the Lab remains totally dedicated to that mission, and to protecting those voices so they can sing forever.

—John W. Fitzpatrick, Louis Agassiz Fuertes Director

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu