Last weekend our ace programmer, France Dewaghe, skipped out of Ithaca for Cape May to catch the tail-end of fall migration. Here at work, we had been thinking a lot about bird identification and the power of groups to hone in on IDs, even tricky ones. So when France came back with a memory card [...]
A new line of greeting cards lets you send an elegant piece of bird art and bring it to life with accurate sounds of the species on the front. The cards are a collaboration between an English company, Really Wild Cards, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Each card features a lovely bird painting taken [...]
Birdsong fascinates scientists because it’s varied, beautiful, complicated—and because many birds learn songs in a way similar to how humans learn language. Studying the way young birds acquire their songs might allow us to solve problems with the way children develop language. Much song research is done by watching young birds in captivity, but research [...]
What do you get when you cross a welder’s mask with a hummingbird feeder? About the closest view of a hummingbird possible without actually climbing inside a flower. At least that’s how it looks from this video demonstration (YouTube). Sure, with a bit of persistence and a porch full of feeders you can make hummers [...]
The cover story in Living Bird Summer 2009—now free online—offers up a tempting prospect for listers: Your trip in search of Mexico’s endemic Tufted Jay just might hold the key to the species’ survival. Or read Stephen J. Bodio’s article about how pigeons influenced Darwin’s thinking on evolution, and never look at pigeons the same [...]
You know what’s super-cool? Putting a lipstick-sized camera on the back of a Black-browed Albatross and turning it loose to forage across the windswept Southern Ocean. That’s what scientists from the National Institute of Polar Research in Japan and the British Antarctic Survey have done with four of the birds, and they’ve wound up with [...]
It was with sadness and appreciation we recently heard of the death, at the whopping age of 37, of a Golden Eagle named Ithaca. Jim Grier, now an emeritus professor at North Dakota State University, participated in the captive breeding of Ithaca and two eaglet siblings while he was a graduate student at the Cornell [...]
