The Cornell Lab of Ornithology bestowed its prestigious Arthur A. Allen Award for 2013 to Dr. Robert Ridgely, at a ceremony May 14 at the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library. The award, named for Cornell Lab founder Arthur Allen, was established in 1967 to honor those who have made significant contributions to ornithology by making it accessible to the general public.

“No individual alive today has contributed more to the understanding and widespread public appreciation of South American birds than Bob Ridgely,” said Cornell Lab director John Fitzpatrick. “Through his own pioneering explorations in the Andean wilderness, his meticulously researched books and articles, and his relentless pursuit of conservation milestones in Ecuador and beyond, Bob embodies everything that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology strives to achieve and support. ”

“As founder of the Cornell Lab, Arthur Allen broke important ground by blurring the lines between amateur naturalists and professional scientists,” Fitzpatrick said. “Today we honor Allen’s vision by recognizing other leaders who help build this vital bridge, and nobody does this better than Robert Ridgely.”

Dr. Ridgely is an expert on Neotropical birds and coauthor of The Birds of Panama, The Birds of Ecuador, and The Birds of South America. Ridgely and fellow birder John Moore discovered a new species of antpitta in Ecuador in 1997.  Subsequently named the Jocotoco Antpitta, it has gangly blue legs, a white cheek patch, and vocalizations that range from a soft hooting to a sharp bark. The endangered bird was given the scientific name Grallaria ridgelyi to honor Dr. Ridgely.

Jocotoco Antpitta by Patty McGann via Wikipedia

Listen to the bird’s call and song, recorded by Dr. Ridgely in 1997. The recording is archived in the Lab’s Macaulay Library collection.

Ridgely is the cofounder and president of Fundación de Conservación Jocotoco, which runs 10 nature reserves in Ecuador. He has worked tirelessly to promote bird conservation during his tenure at the Academy of Natural Sciences and the American Bird Conservancy, continuing to the present in his role as Honorary President of the World Land Trust-US.

“Dr. Robert Ridgely is a trailblazer in conservation as well as one the world’s foremost field ornithologists and tropical researchers,” says Dr. Paul Salaman, Chief Executive Officer of World Land Trust-US. “His no-nonsense approach to conservation has resulted in the purchase of private lands for the protection of birds and their environment, producing real world results.”

Ridgely has been awarded the Eisenmann Medal by the Linnaean Society of New York (2001); the Chandler Robbins Award from the American Birding Association (2006); and the Ralph W. Schreiber Conservation Award by the American Ornithologists’ Union (2011).

Past Winners of the Arthur A. Allen Award include Roger Tory Peterson, Alexander Wetmore, Sir Peter Scott, Alexander Skutch, Tom Cade, Victor Emanuel, and Linda Macaulay.

(Image: 2013 Allen Award recipient Robert Ridgely, center, with two past recipients, Linda Macaulay and Victor Emanuel. Photo courtesy John Fitzpatrick.)

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/bith_genaro.jpg

  Bicknell's Thrushes are rare Northeastern songbirds that winter in the Caribbean.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/map_potential_550.jpg

  The entire population winters in the Caribbean, where potential habitat (green, from McFarland et al. 2013) is scarce.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/cutting_550.jpg

  Fieldworkers surveying inside Sierra de Bahoruco national park discovered extensive illegal clearings.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/04/map_habitat_550.jpg

  Bicknell's Thrushes live in cloud forest (red), which is threatened by agricultural expansion (yellow).

  

Surveys for a rare North American songbird are shedding light on illegal forest clearing in the Dominican Republic, according to researchers from the Vermont Center for Ecostudies and Grupo Jaragua. The ongoing cutting in Sierra de Bahoruco National Park threatens some of Hispaniola’s last remaining undisturbed cloud forest. The park’s forests are a winter home to many North American migrants, refuge for 32 endemic Hispaniolan species, and an important source of freshwater for the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

The deforestation was discovered as researchers surveyed for Bicknell’s Thrushes in the national park. These small, delicately spotted birds have flutelike songs and breed in mountaintop forests from New York and New England through Quebec and Nova Scotia. The entire population spends winters in the Caribbean, mostly on Hispaniola with lesser numbers in parts of Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico.

“It’s a cruel irony that as our Grupo Jaragua colleagues conducted surveys to document where Bicknell’s Thrush occur, they ended up documenting severe habitat loss in one of the species’ important strongholds,” said Chris Rimmer, director of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. “They were literally counting thrushes while watching the cloud forest disappear.”

Because of severe population declines, Bicknell’s Thrush has been called the most threatened migrant songbird in northeastern North America and is under review for listing by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under the Endangered Species Act.

Cutting in the park has been going on since at least 2009, said Yolanda Leon of the Dominican nonprofit Grupo Jaragua. To date, an estimated 30 square miles of forest inside the park boundaries has been cleared. Surveys this winter indicated that clearing was creeping farther upslope and into the sensitive cloud forest.

“A lot of people get confused because they see a huge expanse of pine forest [higher in the park] and they say ‘Oh, the forest is fine,’” Leon said. “But we are looking at this fringe of forest that has a very specific band of occurrence, where the clouds meet the forest. It’s a very complex, beautiful forest, where you have a lot of migratory birds, and a lot of endemic birds.”

In this 2009 aerial photo, agricultural clearing along the park's southern boundary is already evident. Red dots mark locations where the survey team found ongoing clearing. Map courtesy Yolanda Leon, Grupo Jaragua.

In November 2012, Leon and two colleagues, Esteban Garrido and Jesús Almonte, found high concentrations of wintering Bicknell’s Thrushes near the regions of Las Abejas and Los Arroyos on the mountain’s southern slopes. When they returned for more surveys in the first week of April, they discovered that patches of forest had been cleared to the ground. Some had already been planted with avocado, potatoes, beets, carrots, and beans. Elsewhere, cows grazed and makeshift ovens were turning felled timber into charcoal.

Deforestation is a major problem on Hispaniola, where economic conditions force many people to clear forests to collect firewood and grow crops. However, much of the current clearing appears to be a well-funded project of several influential Dominican landowners rather than subsistence agriculture, Leon said. They have instituted a sharecropping system, encouraging Haitian immigrants to clear and farm the land in return for a small share of the harvest.

Complicating the issue is the fact that the southern boundary of the park, though it appears on maps, is not marked on the ground. “A lot of people, they don’t want to get into trouble,” Leon said. “But if they don’t see a marker… they think they are just using fallow land.”

The cloud forest is one of the most important and threatened habitat types in Hispaniola. Sierra de Bahoruco is a part of the Jaragua-Bahoruco-Enriquillo UNESCO biosphere reserve and is a center of biodiversity for birds, amphibians, orchids, and other species. Beyond Bicknell’s Thrushes, other species that depend on the park’s forests are the globally endangered Black-capped Petrel and La Selle Thrush, and more than 30 unique species such as the Hispaniolan Parrot, Hispaniolan Trogon, Hispaniolan Crossbill, and Golden Swallow (more info in a BirdLife International PDF fact sheet).

Preserving intact forest is directly important for humans, too. “The montane forest is the sponge that captures moisture from the clouds. If we don’t have these forests, there’s no freshwater for Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” said Eduardo Iñigo-Elias, who coordinates the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Neotropical Conservation Initiative. The cloud forest of the Sierra de Bahoruco, specifically, feeds the Pedernales River, which forms part of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and supplies towns in both countries.

A separate pressure on the Sierra de Bahoruco’s drier, lower-elevation forests is the harvest of a shrub called guaconejo, or torchwood (Amyris spp.). Fragrant oils contained in the bark put this plant in high demand from the perfume industry, but few sources remain outside of parks, Iñigo-Elias said. Harvesters have begun to freely infiltrate the Dominican Republic’s protected lands, cut the trees, and bring them back to Haiti to ship to France, he said.

The Ministry of the Environment in the Dominican Republic is in charge of enforcing the regulations in national parks, Iñigo-Elias said. Representatives from Grupo Jaragua and Vermont Center for Ecostudies wrote to the ministry and met with staff to describe the situation and express their support for action to curtail the illegal activities. The main goal, according to Leon, is to begin negotiations with the landowners who are underwriting the clearing to arrive at an amicable resolution that protects the park’s lands without unfairly treating the Haitian immigrants hired to do the work.

In the meantime, Grupo Jaragua has launched a Friends of the Sierra de Bahoruco Facebook page (largely in Spanish) for people who want to keep up with developments. They also hope to raise funds to conduct a land occupation study so they can help make effective conservation interventions. The Cornell Lab is a longtime research partner of both Grupo Jaragua and Vermont Center for Ecostudies, and has trained Hispaniolan biologists in mist netting, acoustic surveys, and radio telemetry, and studied threatened species such as the Black-capped Petrel, Golden Swallow, and Bicknell’s Thrush. This work has been made possible by grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to the Cornell Lab.

“This is the wintering ground for so many species that we share with the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” Iñigo-Elias said. “It’s an area of high humanitarian crisis given the lack of freshwater and the lack of fuel. And then on top of that, the last remaining resources are being cut for a few crops. I hope that all involved can come to an agreement that allows the park to do its job in protecting some of these last undisturbed remnants, and continue to provide ecosystem services to the local inhabitants.”

(Images: Bicknell’s Thrush by Pedro Genaro Rodriguez; other photos and maps by Yolanda Leon of Grupo Jaragua.)

Our third annual March Migration Madness tournament kicked off on Tuesday, March 12, when the Whooping Crane faced off against the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. After more than 2,700 total votes, the crane stretched its long legs and walked away with the victory. It will reappear in Round 2 against the winner of the American Kestrel vs. Pileated Woodpecker round.

This year’s species roster features more than a few surprises. They were chosen by fans of the many separate projects here at the Cornell Lab. For example, the stately white crane was a write-in candidate chosen by fans of our Facebook page. The sapsucker represented our Sapsucker Woods page, which gives people news about the 220-acre nature preserve where the Cornell Lab has its offices.

Other species in the tournament represent efforts like Project FeederWatch (Tufted Titmouse), NestWatch (Eastern Bluebird), eBird (Swallow-tailed Kite), YardMap (Pileated Woodpecker), and Merlin (er, Merlin). There are even—gasp—a couple of mammals in play this year. They earned their spots representing projects of ours that study (and conserve) whales and African forest elephants. For the whole list, check out this bracket:

Click the image to download a printable version:

To vote, visit our Facebook page each weekday. We’ll post a photo album with photos of the day’s two contenders—just click “Like” on the one you want to win. There’ll be a new matchup each weekday until April 1, when we’ll decide our new “Chirpion.” Thanks for playing!

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/01/gbbc_cedw.jpeg

  First place, Overall: Cedar Waxwing by Ben Thomas, Georgia.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/01/gbbc_eabl.jpeg

  Fourth place, Overall: Eastern Bluebird by Glenda Simmons, Florida.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/01/gbbc_bcch.jpeg

  Third place, Composition: Black-capped Chickadee by Michele Black, Ohio.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/01/gbbc_will.jpeg

  Fourth place, Composition: Willet by Donald Dvorak, California.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/01/gbbc_bwte.jpeg

  Fifth place, Habitat: Blue-winged Teal by Scott Kinsey, Florida.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/01/gbbc_baow.jpeg

  Fifth place, Behavior: Barred Owls by Shane Conklin, Massachusetts.

  

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/files/2013/01/gbbc_wodu.jpeg

  Second place, Overall: Wood Duck by Bob Howdeshell, Georgia.

  

This year’s Great Backyard Bird Count is happening Feb 15–18. Last year’s count set a new record for participation, netting more than 100,000 checklists. This year could be even bigger, because for the first time ever, the GBBC is going global. Drawing on the international reach of eBird‘s online checklists, we can now accept entries from anyone, anywhere in the world.

I have a hunch it’s going to make the judging for the annual photo contest even more difficult. Already, every year our judges have a tough time sifting through more than 7,000 photo submissions to award prizes and honorable mentions in six categories. What’s going to happen when the field opens up to (hypothetically) six more continents and some 9,000 more species? We can’t wait to find out.

With the aim of giving you a little inspiration, here are the winners of the 2012 photo contest. We’ve chosen a smattering of the winners’ photos to put in the slideshow above—see what we mean about it being hard to decide? You can also check out submissions from 2012 and past years on the GBBC website.

While you’re there, look over the summary of the 2012 results—tangible evidence of how GBBC participants have helped us understand the winter distribution of birds across the continent. We can’t wait for this year’s count to expand our view to the rest of the world. Where will you be counting from?

(New to the GBBC? Find out how to participate. Veteran counter? Tell your friends and let them in on the fun!)

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Black Swamp Bird Observatory are excited to introduce the Young Birders Network. This new website offers a wealth of resources geared toward birders of high-school age. This site enables young birders to connect with peers, find clubs in their area, discover conferences and events, and find information on colleges and careers related to birds. And because the site is housed on the eBird website, students can easily track their sightings and keep updated on events via a single convenient website.

Over the past few years, the growing young birders movement has gained support in the form of local young birders clubs founded by motivated organizations in several states. These clubs offer opportunities for teenage birders to learn and bird together, and have greatly strengthened the community among high school aged birders. As more clubs form and more events for young birders appear, the need for a central information hub has grown; the Young Birders Network aims to fill that role.

Some teenage birders go on to pursue ornithology or conservation biology as a career. The Young Birders Network provides ideas for transitioning a hobby of birding into a meaningful career. Since young birders represent a variety of interests and talents, the site addresses an assortment of career options ranging from biology to art to computer science. The site’s sections on colleges, undergraduate majors, and careers contain information on incorporating any of these interests into a career related to birds and conservation.

Additionally, the site helps young birders to locate networking opportunities. There are links to active Facebook groups, as well as to young birders’ blogs from across the world. There is also a complete listing of camps, conferences, and other events available at the national level. Finally, the site contains a comprehensive list of local young birders clubs across the country.

Though the listing of young birders clubs is all-inclusive, many regions still lack any such organizations. This leaves ample room for motivated individuals and organizations to create clubs in their local area. Though many groups may be interested in doing so, they might not know how to get started. To promote club-founding efforts, the Young Birders Network features a toolkit that provides encouragement and logistical advice for starting clubs. Regardless of affiliations, most young birders clubs experience similar challenges during their early years. This document aims to ease these issues by answering common questions and concerns.

We are constantly working to improve the site, and we welcome any feedback or suggestions that you have. If you know of additional resources that should be included, or think of questions that should be addressed, please contact us at ybnetwork@cornell.edu. If you have questions about starting a club, the Black Swamp Bird Observatory is happy to advise and support; contact youngbirdersnetwork@bsbo.org. We intend this site to be a comprehensive information source for young birders, and this is not possible without the input of knowledgeable contributors. Thank you, and please visit us at www.youngbirdersnetwork.net and on Facebook.

(This post was written by Hope Batcheller, Cornell ’14, a founding member of the Young Birders Network. Image by Jessie Barry.)

To a computer, it’s just a complex combination of ones and zeros. Decoded for our ears, it becomes wondrous sound—a symphony, or the song of a lark. Thanks to digital technology, recordings of bird, insect, mammal, fish, and amphibian voices in the Lab’s Macaulay Library will last virtually forever. It’s taken more than 12 years, but all archived reel-to-reel analog recordings going back to 1929 have now been digitized to the highest industry standards and made available online. It’s a major milestone.

“Our audio collection is the largest and the oldest,” explains Macaulay Library director Mike Webster. “Now, it’s also the most accessible. Having the collection digitized brings the Macaulay Library into the 21st century. Now we’re working to improve search functions and create tools people can use to collect recordings and upload them directly to the archive.”

The audio and video recordings are searchable and free to play online, whether to brush up on familiar sounds or to explore the nooks and crannies of the wider world. As a sort of sampler plate, we’ve compiled a list of seven great sounds plus a video—they’re listed at the end of this post.

The archive now contains about 150,000 audio recordings: 10 terabytes of data with a total run time of 7,513 hours (313 days). More than 7,000 species are represented, with a heavy emphasis on birds. But you’ll also find whales, elephants, frogs, tigers, primates, and more. New material is coming in all the time from recordists around the world, both amateur and professional.

In all, 18 audio archivists took part in digitizing the sounds. Archivist Martha Fischer takes the award for most clips: she handled more than 17,000 recordings since 2000. It’s not as simple as it sounds. Older tapes were often in poor condition. Saving a recording sometimes meant heating the tape in a vacuum oven to reseal shedding oxide particles and get perhaps one or two more passes through a playback machine. You might have only one chance to get it right.

It can be a strain to listen intensely all day. “I do get a little squirrely, sometimes,” Fischer said. “But it’s a nice feeling to know I’ve contributed to making all this material available to people.” But some moments transported her to another time and place. A dawn chorus recording featuring 19 bird species in Queensland, Australia, captured by recordist Eleanor Brown, is one of her favorites. Fischer also mentions recordings of the indri, a large lemur native to Madagascar, with an unforgettable voice (see list, below).

And sometimes archivists hear more than the intended target. “Snoring,” Fischer laughs. “I’ve heard dogs barking, construction, cars, chimps passing gas, and a lot of stomach rumblings.” Collecting the recordings can apparently be tiring, hungry work, too.

The archive cannot rest on its laurels however. In addition to collecting new material, the technology is always changing so even digitized material will likely have to be migrated to new media types in the future. What will remain the same, though, is the human need to listen and perhaps better understand the many creatures who share the planet with us.

“Sound is a huge component of most animals, including most vertebrates and insects, “Webster says. “I think you don’t really know an animal until you pay attention to the sounds it makes. I feel people are missing a lot about nature itself if they don’t experience it with their ears.”

A Sampler: Seven Top Sounds—Plus a Video

• Earliest recording: Cornell Lab founder Arthur Allen was a pioneer in sound recording. On a spring day in 1929 he recorded this Song Sparrow sounding much as they do today.
• Youngest bird: This clip from 1966 records the sounds of an Ostrich chick while it is still inside the egg—and the researchers as they watch.
• Liveliest wake-up call: A dawn chorus in tropical Queensland, Australia is bursting at the seams with warbles, squeals, whistles, booms, and hoots.
• Best candidate to appear on a John Coltrane record: The indri, a lemur with a voice that is part moan, part jazz clarinet.
• Most spines tingled: The incomparable voice of a Common Loon on an Adirondacks lake in 1992.
• Most likely to be mistaken for aliens arriving: Birds-of-paradise make some amazing sounds—here’s the UFO-sound of a Curl-crested Manucode in New Guinea.
• The unrivaled repertoire of Homo sapiens: Here’s an amazing recording of a temple ceremony in Vrindavan, India, combining drums, gongs, voices, wind, brass, and strings.
• Living up to its name: Our video archive is a great place to peek at an animal’s behavioral style. This American Dipper—our only aquatic songbird—looks fully at home as it bobs and walks underwater in an Alaska stream.

(This post was written by Pat Leonard. Image: Common Loon by Raymond Lee via Birdshare.)

Lab director John Fitzpatrick kicked things off with his argument that birds really can save the world, by capturing our imaginations and inspiring us to great things. Subsequent talks covered the contributions of citizen science to conservation policy, the enormous communicative power of high-resolution nest cameras, our unique approach to education, and more.

As a special treat, the session closed with the full Birds-of-Paradise Project lecture by Cornell Lab scientist Ed Scholes and National Geographic photographer Tim Laman. They showed some of the amazing video they collected and described the behind-the-scenes details of their eight-year project.

About 250 people attended the event, and more than a hundred viewed the event live as we streamed it online. If you missed the talks, you can watch the archived versions here. To help you navigate through the 2.5-hour video, here are the times at which each speaker begins his or her presentation:

5:34 John Fitzpatrick: Birds can save the world
22:55 Ken Rosenberg: How eBird lists affect national conservation poicy
31:00 Chris Clark: Listening to whales in a noisy ocean
43:45  Miyoko Chu: Bird Cams—Hawks, herons and other stars of the small screen
52:12 Nancy Trautmann: Connecting kids with science and nature through birds
57:53 Miyoko Chu: Merlin—Can a computer ID your bird?
1:06:30 Mike Webster: Digital ornithology
1:16:10 Gerrit Vyn: Filming the Spoon-billed Sandpiper
1:26:30 Birds-of-Paradise introductory video
1:32:15 Tim Laman and Ed Scholes: Birds-of-Paradise presentation.

On the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, twin spotlights once again shot into the night sky above Manhattan to offer a tribute to the men and women we lost during the 2001 attacks.

It was a clear and cool night, almost calm and with a hint of a southerly breeze. In another long-repeated annual event, thousands of birds passed over New York City on their way to winter homes in the southern U.S. and Central and South America. Cornell Lab scientist Andrew Farnsworth was on hand to count them.

Farnsworth spent the early evening until about 10:00 p.m. atop the Empire State Building and then watched from the Tribute in Light itself until 12:30 a.m. (accompanied by other birders and a Wall Street Journal reporter). In all he saw at least 2,000 birds and heard the faint chip notes of many more. He identified 28 species passing overhead and at times flying through the beams of light, where the rush of bodies looked like flurries of snow, he said.

Watching carefully with binoculars, he was able to identify a bewildering diversity of the tiny, 5-inch songbirds as they passed through the beams, recording Magnolia, Chestnut-sided, Black-and-white, and Blackpoll warblers, as well as Common Yellowthroats, Ovenbirds, Northern Waterthrushes, and 43 American Redstarts. Five male Black-throated Blue Warblers were still in such bright plumage that they “stand out like a sore thumb in the lights,” he wrote in his eBird checklist for the night. He also recorded Wood Thrushes, Swainson’s Thrushes, Veeries, Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Gray Catbirds, and Baltimore Orioles.

The lights illuminated a few larger birds as well, including a young Laughing Gull that was trying to catch insects, three Green Herons, an unidentified rail (likely a Sora)—as well as a Peregrine Falcon that made repeated hunting dives at the smaller birds. Farnsworth said he saw at least five successful attacks on warblers.

The Tribute in Light happens during a time of peak migration in the Northeast. The birds often become briefly disoriented in the lights, and most years the lights are briefly shut off throughout the night to allow circling birds to reorient themselves. This year, on a night with only moderate migrant traffic, Farnsworth saw no evidence of casualties (aside from the peregrine’s catches).

The Tribute serves as a double reminder: that city lights, when left on en masse, nationwide, for an entire migration season, take a major toll on migrating birds (see the Fatal Light Awareness Program for more); but also, of the great spectacle of bird migration that accompanies us through fall. An invisible river of animals, rivaling any scene from the Serengeti but consisting of half-ounce birds that pass quietly overhead, in the dark.

Farnsworth is a lead scientist in our BirdCast project. Its ambitious goal is to produce accurate, real-time forecasts of local migration by combining data from radar, weather conditions, and acoustic recordings of the birds’ own brief call notes, which can be identified to species. While it will be a boon to anxious birders wondering what might turn up near them (you can check predictions at the BirdCast website), BirdCast also aims to provide advance knowledge of hazardous conditions at wind turbines so they can reduce their impact on birds.

The project is still in its first year, although researchers have been applying technology to the study of migration for decades. Weather radar is good at detecting flying birds, even allowing Farnsworth to estimate the numbers of birds aloft on Tuesday night, for instance. Judging by the radar readings, he said, one cubic kilometer of New York City sky probably contained 100–200 birds at any one time on September 11. That’s not bad, according to Farnsworth, but the two previous nights had been even better, when some 600–1,000 birds filled the same volume of sky. They were audible even over city noises—cars in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, sirens, construction work—the birds’ short, sibilant call notes raining down at the rate of 3 to 5 per second at times.

Which brings up a third reminder from the Tribute in Light: if dozens of species, and thousands of birds, routinely pass over a metropolis in pitch darkness, night after night, then doesn’t that make autumn one of the most exciting times to be a bird watcher?

BirdCast is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation, and involves partners at the Cornell Lab, Microsoft, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

(Image by Greg Chow via Creative Commons.)

It couldn’t have arrived in better style: Liron Gertsman, a keen young birder from Vancouver, British Columbia, reported an American Robin along with 23 other species as part of his standard bird watching routine. That’s exactly how we want people to be using eBird—to keep records of everyday sightings. In addition to maintaining a complete history of your own personal birding journey, those records combine to provide a comprehensive picture of birds across the continent, and ultimately the world.

To celebrate the achievement, the eight members of the eBird team are assembling a prize package of specially chosen gifts to send to Liron. They’ve also selected one eBirder at random to receive a prize package, and that award goes to Wisconsin birder Chuck Heikkinen (whose winning checklist included Whooping Cranes, Buff-breasted Sandpipers, and more).

Congratulations Liron and Chuck! And thanks to everyone who submits observations to eBird. Because of your efforts, we are building one of the largest environmental databases in existence. Read more about both winners (and their prizes!) on the eBird site.

(Bird photos by Liron Gertsman; photo of Liron by Andre Chan.)

The new species was discovered during a 2008 expedition led by Michael G. Harvey, Glenn Seeholzer, and Ben Winger, young ornithologists who had recently graduated from Cornell at the time. They were accompanied by coauthor Daniel Cáceres, a graduate of the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín in Arequipa, Peru, and local Ashéninka guides.

The team discovered the barbet on a ridge of montane cloud forest in the Cerros del Sira range in the eastern Andes. Steep ridges and deep river gorges in the Andes produce many isolated habitats and microclimates that give rise to unique species.

Mike Harvey was first to see the new species on October 8, 2008. “It was sitting about 60 feet up on a bare branch,” he said. “At first we thought it was the Scarlet-banded Barbet (Capito wallacei), but the more we looked at it, the more we saw obvious differences in its plumage.”

Though clearly a sister species of the Scarlet-banded Barbet, the Sira Barbet is readily distinguished by differences in color on the bird’s flanks, lower back, and thighs and a wider, darker scarlet breast band. By comparing mitochondrial DNA sequences of the new barbet to DNA sequences of its close relatives in the genus Capito, the team secured genetic evidence that this is indeed a new species in the barbet family (Capitonidae). The genetic work was done by coauthor Jason Weckstein at The Field Museum in Chicago.

The team chose the scientific name of the new species, Capito fitzpatricki, in honor of Cornell Lab of Ornithology executive director Dr. John W. Fitzpatrick, who discovered and named 7 new bird species in Peru during the 1970s and 1980s.

“Fitz has inspired generations of young ornithologists in scientific discovery and conservation,” says Ben Winger. “He was behind us all the way when we presented our plan for this expedition.”

The 2008 expedition was made possible by funding from a special gift to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and donations to the Lab’s student World Series of Birding team, Rawlings Cornell Presidential Research Scholars, National Geographic Young Explorers’ Grant, and the Explorers Club. Since the discovery, Harvey and Seeholzer have enrolled as Ph.D. students at Louisiana State University, and Winger is a Ph.D. student at  the University of Chicago.

(Image: Sira Barbet by Michael G. Harvey.)