Introducing BNA Online

Photo credit: Jon Reis

Alan Poole poses beside the full set of hard-copy BNA accounts he edited during the past decade. Soon the accounts will be available online.

Only four times in the history of American ornithology has an effort been made to publish a complete set of the life histories of our continent’s breeding birds. Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon both produced massive volumes, complete with hand-colored illustrations, in the early 19th century. Arthur Cleveland Bent followed suit a century later with his popular series, Life Histories of North American Birds. The Lab of Ornithology is now home to the most recent of these efforts, the monumental 18-volume Birds of North America (BNA).

BNA provides in-depth information on nearly all aspects of the biology and ecology of breeding birds in the United States (including Hawaii) and Canada—some 740 species—summarizing much of what is known about each species. Hundreds of authors across the continent were involved in this decade-long effort, based at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences with the Lab of Ornithology as one of its major partners. From conservation to breeding behavior, distribution to migration, diet to population dynamics, and molts to vocalizations, BNA covers it all.

But currently—unless you live near a research library or have a friend with six feet of shelf space who purchased the series—you may have a hard time accessing this information. The Lab of Ornithology intends to change that. When the final volumes were published late last year, the Lab acquired the rights to the series and invited BNA chief editor Alan Poole to join our staff. Alan arrived this past spring and is now creating an online version of BNA, which will be available next year through the Lab’s web site www.birds.cornell.edu.

These days most large encyclopedias have web-based versions, which provide significant advantages over the older paper volumes. Online material can be updated quickly and easily, creating a living resource instead of one increasingly out of date. In addition, an online database is searchable, a distinct advantage when you’re trying to find material scattered through BNA’s 18,000 pages. Need clutch-size data for all waterfowl nesting west of the Rockies? You’ll be able to get it with just a couple of keystrokes. Another few clicks and you’ll have comparable data for ducks breeding in Quebec or Texas. Clearly the research possibilities are extraordinary. Never before has this depth of information on North American birds been available so quickly and easily to so many.

BNA Online will also take advantage of the many sound and video resources in the Lab’s Macaulay Library. Linked to the BNA account of the Franklin’s Gull, for example, you might find a half-dozen photographs of its prairie nesting sloughs, of young and the floating reed nests that support them, close-ups of different plumages that vary with season and age, as well as video sequences of courtship and feeding behavior, to name just a few possibilities. A link to the Lab’s eBird database might provide a glimpse of where this species is found during migration. And most of the online BNA accounts will provide recordings of calls and songs. So even in the depths of winter from the comfort of your home, you’ll have access to recordings of thrush songs in the northern forests or the din of a gull colony in the Carolinas.

Clearly the possibilities are limitless, and the size and content of online species accounts will grow as the BNA project evolves. But large databases require considerable effort to develop and maintain, as well as the initial cost of acquiring the material. To recoup these expenses, the Lab will charge a modest fee for accessing this extraordinary database. Lab members will receive a discount. Much of The Birds of North America will be available online by early 2004.