A World Center for Bird Study

We are finally all moved in at the Imogene Powers Johnson Center for Birds and Biodiversity, and it’s still hard to believe. The completion of this building represents the culmination of a five-year effort to design, raise funds for, and construct the ideal ornithological research institute at Sapsucker Woods. Under the tireless leadership of Lab director John Fitzpatrick and an active, enthusiastic administrative board, the project took off like a rocket and nothing could stop it.

Photo credit: Jon Reis

The Imogene Powers Johnson Center for Birds and Biodiversity

When I came here 13 years ago, the Lab of Ornithology was tiny. We had a handful of programs and fewer than 50 employees, housed in a low-slung 1950s-style cinderblock building and a couple of single-wide mobile office trailers. We were all fond of that place, but it had long outlived its usefulness in terms of size and function.

The Johnson Center has roughly five times the square footage as the original facility, but it’s arranged to minimize its impact on the environment, both physically and aesthetically. Unlike the old one-story building, the Johnson Center has two full stories, plus a third-floor mezzanine, which houses our Information Technologies group.

I remember the day the architects from Hillier gathered the Lab staff together in the old Fuertes Room. Over a breakfast of muffins, bagels, and coffee, we discussed our personal visions of what the ideal Lab of Ornithology would look like. The architects showed us numerous pictures of other buildings, and we talked about their individual merits and shortcomings. Gradually, we selected bits and pieces from each, pointing out things we liked and disliked. We sought to create a research institute for the 21st century, capable of using the best new technologies to further the study and conservation of birds.

One of the important things we did was to provide a new home for the massive Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates, which had been in “temporary” quarters for some 30 years in an aging cinderblock building near the airport. The collections—which include fishes, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and, of course, birds—are now an amazing resource for Lab staff, Cornell researchers, students, and visitors from around the world. We also added an Evolutionary Biology program with a complete DNA lab and significantly boosted the workspace of the Macaulay Library, the Bioacoustics Research Program, and other Lab programs. And our thousands of ornithological books and journals finally have the home they deserve in the Adelson Library.

We are particularly pleased with the reconstruction of the Fuertes Room. This room was originally the personal library of Frederick Foster Brewster, in his New Haven, Connecticut, mansion. He had commissioned famed bird artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes in 1909 to design the teak-paneled library and complete a series of oil paintings that would wrap around the room. He left the entire contents of the library to the Lab in his will, and it was reconstructed in the old Lab building in 1968, complete with the teak walls, glassed-in bookcases, and paintings. I’m happy to report that this second reconstruction of Brewster’s library is a great improvement and much closer to the original.

We had considered at one point constructing a series of smaller buildings, spread out in a campus-like setting, but we opted instead to create one large building to house all of our programs and staff. The idea was to bring people from a diversity of fields together in one building and see what kinds of interesting discussions and collaborations might develop. The Johnson Center houses an amazingly varied group of people. We have world-renowned scientists studying everything from birds to bats, whales, elephants, fish, and snakes. We have engineers striving to develop more effective ways to record, analyze, and use wildlife sound recordings to study behavior and to census populations. We have computer programmers working to stretch the capabilities of Internet technology to gather data on birds.

In the staff lounge, strategically placed in one of the best birding locations, an expert on bird vocalizations might have lunch with one person who studies rattlesnakes, another who studies catfish, and another who is developing high-performance computer applications for wildlife research. The ensuing discussions and cross-fertilizations can only boost the effectiveness of the research in all of these fields. The Lab of Ornithology is about creating synergies—developing connections across disciplines to provide a fertile environment for innovation and discovery. The Lab has become a great magnet for Cornell students, both undergraduate and graduate, which also adds to the rich intellectual mix.