The winter of 2008-2009 was a huge year for Pine Siskins across the United States. As the dainty yellow-and-brown finches poured across the country, sightings from Project FeederWatch participants documented one of the largest siskin irruptions on record. Now, a preliminary analysis of banding data by FeederWatch leader David Bonter suggests the birds may have [...]
One glossy python and eight automated recorders: those were the highlights we heard about this weekend from Peter Wrege and Liz Rowland. They’re spending the next six weeks recording elephants in Gabon—here’s post #2 from them: Everything is in place: eight autonomous recording units (ARUs) now surround the bai (clearing) at distances ranging from 150 [...]
Not everything we study at the Cornell Lab has feathers. Some have thick wrinkly skin, enormous ears, and an oversized nose they can grab things with. That’s what the scientists in our Elephant Listening Project study. Two of them—Peter Wrege and Liz Rowland—have just headed into the rainforest of Gabon for a stint of recording [...]
This week we were encouraged to see that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has begun posting counts of bird species that have been recovered in the Gulf of Mexico during the oil spill. The first such report lists 4,676 individuals representing some 85 species, plus another 19 categories for incompletely identified birds. The new [...]
I’ll admit it, satellites boggle my mind. Even though I’m quite happy to listen to my phone tell me where to find the best Caribbean restaurant in Albany, I still can’t quite believe that our species has built machines that fly around our planet and tell us what they see. But the truth is that [...]
