Photo: Diane Tessaglia-Hymes

Visitors to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are sometimes surprised to learn that the Lab's Bioacoustics Research Program is one of the world's centers for the study of whale sounds. This strength in marine research is a relatively recent development, but a broad interest in animal sounds has always been a focal point of the Lab of Ornithology. In a white paper written in 1955 by the Lab's founders, Arthur A. Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg, the objectives of the Lab are:

"To maintain the Laboratory of Ornithology and to encourage support for its work from [those] interested in the study of birds and biological acoustics."

"To encourage studies based on the recording or involving the use of recordings, and studies involving the hearing mechanism and voice production of animals ..."

"To carry out ... projects ... so as to promote a better understanding of nature in its broadest sense including all natural phenomena."

Since the Lab's founding, the Macaulay Library has acquired not only the world's largest collection of bird sounds, but also many recordings of other animals.

Whale studies are a part of the BRP's research agenda for many reasons. The underwater environment provides favorable conditions for long-range transmission of sound, and severely limits the transmission of light. Thus, aquatic organisms have evolved in conditions that strongly favor the evolution of acoustic communication, and whales probably communicate at much greater distances than any terrestrial organism. From a research perspective, this means that acoustic methods can study whale behavior over much larger areas than would be possible for any terrestrial species. Insights from whale research add to the broader understanding of sound communication mechanisms and the evolutionary basis of animal communication systems.

Whale research also provides a special opportunity to develop new research tools and analysis techniques. To meet the challenges of marine research, BRP has developed improved methods for collecting and displaying sounds, as well as advanced techniques for detecting, locating, and tracking vocalizing free-ranging animals. Many of these tools have direct application to studies of all sound producing animals. Thus, bird research directly benefits from advances made in studies of whales.

As an example, the acoustic location system that BRP director Dr. Christopher W. Clark and his colleagues developed to census bowhead whales has been adapted for studies of acoustic interactions among territorial songbirds. Prior to this development, it has been nearly impossible to study the behavior of several songbirds at once. Thanks to the the advances made during the bowhead whale research, biologists can now study acoustic interactions among birds in ways that were never before possible.

Sometimes the transfer of research technology at BRP works the other way around. The techniques developed for an ongoing study of nocturnal bird migration are helping to solve the problem of automatically detecting and identifying animal sounds on lengthy recordings—a problem shared by elephant and whale researchers.

Arthur Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg, the Lab's founders, succeeded in establishing the international reputation of the Lab through the development and use of innovative technology. Here, they exhibit their recording equipment, state-of-the-art at the time.