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.)

They’re a couple of weeks later than last year, but the Great Blue Herons of Sapsucker Woods have returned to their nest outside our offices. The male from past years (recognizable by the missing rear toe on his right foot) was first spotted on April 4, and on April 8 a female joined him on the nest. For more than two hours, the herons perched near one another, taking time to preen, joust with their bills, and tug at the sticks in the nest as spring peepers chorused and the light grew dim.

In past years, these first days of courtship have rapidly led to egg-laying and incubation. Bird Cams viewers have watched the birds continuing to court and arrange the nest in recent days. The birds copulated on April 9, suggesting a first egg may arrive soon.

This nest has a four-year history of fledging young (last year saw a bumper crop of five juvenile herons). Don’t miss the incredible courtship of these beautiful birds, viewed live from 40 feet above Sapsucker Woods Pond.

We’ll continue to post updates on the Bird Cams Facebook page and on twitter at @birdcams. Thanks for joining us as we share the beauty and excitement of another breeding season unfolding in Sapsucker Woods!

(Image: screen capture from Bird Cams)

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!

Are you going to be counting birds in the Great Backyard Bird Count this year? We hope so—it’s a fun and free event that tens of thousands of people share in each year, submitting more than 100,000 checklists over the Presidents’ Day weekend. The data create a snapshot of bird populations across North America (and this year, the world) that helps scientists track how our birds are doing over time.

This year there are plenty of reasons to get involved:

• It’s free and it takes as little as 15 minutes
• This year, for the first time, submit data from anywhere in the world
• You can win prizes just by participating
• It’s fun to do with friends and family—send an eCard invitation (like the one above) to get your gang together
• You can enter our GBBC photo contest, which features wonderful images and lots of prizes
• Get warmed up with this beautiful watercolor poster of 10 common birds
• From now until the end of the GBBC, you can buy the BirdLog smartphone app for just $0.99 (a 90% savings)

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

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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  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’s Macaulay Library is the world’s largest and oldest archive of natural sounds and video, and you can browse its holdings online. Though it’s best known for its bird recordings, the Macaulay Library also features insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals—including a recent addition: gibbons recorded in the wild in Thailand. They’re the work of Warren Brockelman, who spent years studying the apes and recently added his recordings to the archive.

“The beautiful movements of gibbons in the trees and their incredible songs whetted my appetite for studying them in the wild,” recalled ecologist Warren Brockelman (B.A. Cornell ’63; at left). Brockelman first encountered gibbons while working for the army in a Bangkok field laboratory during the Vietnam War. After the war he settled in Thailand (his wife is a Thai zoologist) and in 1976 began doing gibbon research in the Khao Yai National Park, a large reserve about three hours northeast of Bangkok. He concentrated on two species in particular, the white-handed gibbon (Hylobates lar) and the endangered pileated gibbon (Hylobates pileatus).

As he worked in the jungle, Brockelman was entranced by the duets of the gibbons, their voices falling, rising, and carrying for more than a mile. Then he got close enough with his trusty reel-to-reel Nagra SN recorder (first developed for spy agencies and the film industry) to pick up the softer sounds that other recordists had missed. “One thing that gibbons ‘talk’ about is threats,” Brockelman says, “When I heard a soft, barely audible hu-hu-hu-hu above me it meant that the male had detected me below, and the group immediately stopped what it was doing.” There are about 10-15 distinct sounds in the gibbon “vocabulary.”

Even when they sing together, mated male and female gibbons don’t sing the same song. The distinctive female part is the “great call,” a series of hoots lasting 15 to 20 seconds. “One of my most important findings was that young gibbons do not learn to sing the species-specific patterns of their duets, but the patterns are rather strictly inherited,” Brockelman explains. “They appear to have no attributes of language as it is defined for humans. They are rigid and stereotyped, like bird song—even more so because some birds can learn new phrases.” Females usually initiate the duet with a quiet hua-hua sound. Brockelman and his colleagues also brought much new information to light about gibbon society, including how slowly populations grow—a mated pair produces a single offspring only once every three years.

Even working in an environment populated with wild elephants, cobras, tree vipers, pythons, bears, and (at that time) tigers, Brockelman says the biggest scare came from his own species. Half a dozen insurgents once held him at gunpoint with AK-47 rifles. He managed to talk them into letting him go. “Wild animals are much more predictable,” says Brockelman.

When Brockelman decided it was time to preserve his recordings, he turned to the Macaulay Library. He worked with archivist David McCartt to preserve his written data and turn the analog recordings into digital files. Because the tapes were stored for more than 30 years, sometimes in damp conditions, the process was more complicated than you might expect. Macaulay Library engineer Karl Fiske jury-rigged a device that meant hand-winding the old tapes past Q-tips to clean the tapes. But it worked like a charm, and about half the recordings have been digitized. Brockelman expects to visit again next year to archive the rest.

“Warren kept very organized records,” says McCartt. “I think he’s like a lot of researchers who are now looking for a place where they can permanently archive their work and know it will be well cared for and available to everyone.”

Listen to a few of Brockelman’s gibbon recordings:

• White-handed gibbon 1 (male and female duet; 1980)
• White-handed gibbon 2 (male and female duet; 1980)
• Pileated gibbon (male and female duet, with young female joining in; 1980)

(This post was written by Pat Leonard. Photos courtesy of Warren Brockelman.)

The new National Geographic documentary chronicling the Birds-of-Paradise Project will air on Thanksgiving evening at 10 P.M. Eastern time, perfect timing for post-turkey viewing. (The documentary is also available on DVD.) Staff writer Pat Leonard took an early look and has this review for you:

Scientific discovery is thrilling—but sometimes difficult and messy, too. Nowhere is that more evident than in “Winged Seduction: Birds of Paradise,” the new documentary from National Geographic TV. I was intrigued by the lengths the team had to go to in order to get such fleeting footage of these amazing birds (like the Twelve-wired Birds-of-Paradise above).

The program follows biologist Ed Scholes from the Cornell Lab and photojournalist Tim Laman into the jungle-clothed mountains and valleys of New Guinea and surrounding islands. Their quest to visually document all 39 species of the birds-of-paradise took 18 expeditions during 8 years at 51 field sites. Their success has introduced the marvels of a little-known but powerful branch of evolution, known as sexual selection, to the wider world. As the scientists explain on camera, sexual selection is why these extravagantly plumed males sing, dance, and transform into new shapes, all in the name of love (or at least reproduction).

Without giving too much away, you’ll see how Tim and Ed, working with native guides and assistants, found what they needed in the “jungle hardware store” to build blinds, ladders, huts, and more. These sturdy structures let them get close enough to these magnificent birds to document behavior never seen before. In some cases, that meant perching in the treetops along with the birds, 150 feet above the ground, to capture breathtaking dawn mating dances against a lush jungle backdrop. Just as often it meant bashing through hot, muddy, bug-and-leech-bedeviled jungle valleys, sometimes parked in cramped blinds for days to capture a few seconds of coveted video. The reward was worth the risk, as the two men watched the spellbinding rituals of the Twelve-wired Bird-of-Paradise, the Superb Bird-of-Paradise, the King-of-Saxony Bird-of-Paradise and so much more.

One of the scientists’ more ingenious creations was to cloak a treetop-mounted camera with large leaves so the birds would not be distracted or scared away. This “leaf-cam” captured some of the most entrancing images (see more of it in our Living Bird online article). Tim and Ed then rigged up their own “jungle ethernet” to make tree-to-tree computer connections for this modern-day version of biological specimen collection.

Above all, you’ll admire the birds—and gain a new respect for the power of female decision making. Over millennia, female birds-of-paradise have chosen males with more and more outrageous decorations and fancy footwork. With few predators to make being eye-catching a hazard, and isolated in their remote mountains and valleys, the male birds-of-paradise have become some of the most outlandish birds on the planet. (I found myself wondering if the process works the same way in human relationships too!)

The show chronicles the trials and travails of the researchers, so it may leave you itching to see more of the birds. You can get your fill at the Cornell Lab YouTube Channel and our Macaulay Library website. Tim and Ed have contributed more than 2,000 video clips to the archive that show bird-of-paradise behaviors and some very un-birdlike sounds. The accompanying book, Birds of Paradise: Revealing the World’s Most Extraordinary Birds has “holiday gift” written all over it, if you have a birder on your list! Tim and Ed are taking the show on the road in the coming year. Check here to find out if they’ll be speaking in a city near you.

The Birds-of-Paradise Project is a joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Geographic Society.

How can we make life easier for birds in our neighborhoods? That’s the question behind the latest seasonal challenge from Celebrate Urban Birds. This Cornell Lab of Ornithology citizen-scence project focuses on birds in urban settings and how they benefit from green spaces created by humans. Enter by December 15, 2012, and you could win a prize!

Several times per year the project holds contests, or “challenges” to get participants thinking about birds in their neighborhoods. Challenge entries may be photographs, artwork, video, a story, or a poem showing how birds are surviving and making use of their habitat.

“As part of this challenge, we want to see the creative or interesting ways in which people help wild birds,” says project leader Karen Purcell. “Or it could be as simple as setting up feeders or nest boxes, providing water, or planting flowers that provide seeds.”

Deadline for entries is December 15, 2012. Learn more about how you can take part.

Great prizes include feeders from challenge sponsor Kaytee, plus bird guides, sound recordings, posters, fun bird books for adults and children, and more.

How to participate:
1. Email your entry to urbanbirds@cornell.edu
2. Write your FirstName_LastName_City_State_NOBIRD in the subject line
3. Include your postal address in the body of the email
4. Please explain where the photo was taken and the name of the bird if you know it
5. Read and agree to the terms and conditions of the Challenge

See examples of current entries for this bird-inspired challenge.

Celebrate Urban Birds is a free, year-round citizen-science project focused on birds in neighborhood settings.

(Image: Cedar Waxwing by Bob Howdeshell via Celebrate Urban Birds)

As Project FeederWatch gets under way for its 26th season, we’re celebrating with a new photo contest sponsored by Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods. The contest features weekly prizes for the photo that receives the most votes on the contest page in Facebook. At the end of FeederWatch season, we’ll hold a vote to determine the grand prize winner, who will win a trip for two to Oregon to go birding with Bob and tour the Red Mill, among other great prizes.

Each week’s contest features a theme for the photos. We’ll post the theme each Wednesday and you can begin uploading photos and/or voting for them immediately. Voting lasts until Sunday night, and we’ll announce the winner on Monday morning and contact them to send a prize package of tasty Bob’s Red Mill products and a few souvenirs from the Cornell Lab.

A few other notes on how the system works:

• Be sure to enter your photo on the contest tab. Photos uploaded to our main Facebook page won’t be voted on.
• Enter only one photo per week. Choose wisely!
• Photos don’t have to be taken the week of the contest, so you can look through your archives.
• You may vote for as many photos as you like, although you may only vote for each photo once (to avoid running up the score).
• When you enter a photo, you grant us permission to use it in the future (as with other Project FeederWatch photo submissions). Please be sure to upload only photos that are yours. Full contest rules are posted here.
• You don’t have to be a Project FeederWatch member to enter—but we hope you’ll join the project anyway!

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.