When the gavel fell last week at the auction of John James Audubon’s “The Birds of America” the price for the rare first edition was almost $8 million—the third highest sum ever paid at auction for a book. But what a book! Its phenomenal size and heft simply doesn’t come through in photos, but the 435 [...]
We’re in the midst of creating a free, online bird ID tool that can answer everyone’s first birding question, “What is that bird I saw?”—and we need your help to train the system. The project, called Merlin™, combines artificial intelligence with input from everyday birders and bird occurrence data from eBird. By using observations from birders [...]
Scientists working in Haiti have obtained the first-ever photos of an endangered Black-capped Petrel chick—a little ball of gray fluff that was discovered at its nest inside a mountaintop cave. The finding helps answer questions about this secretive species’ life cycle. These crow-sized seabirds nest only in the Caribbean and feed as far away as [...]
