Thirty-nine of the most gorgeous, outlandish animals in the world—the birds-of-paradise—live only in New Guinea, associated islands, and adjacent tropical Australia. Though they’ve been known for centuries from paintings and specimens, it’s only now that all 39 can be admired in glorious photographic detail, thanks to ground-breaking work by Cornell Lab biologist Ed Scholes and [...]
Imagine you walk into the neighborhood coffee house for your morning cup of joe, and on the counter is a tip jar with a sign reading, “$ for wintering warblers” with a photo of a Chestnut-sided Warbler in a tropical forest. You’d drop your change in, right? Any proud bird watcher would do their part [...]
Our fourth annual Young Birders Event brought together 10 expert young birders for a long weekend at the Cornell Lab in July. In addition to touring our favorite local birding spots, the high-school-age students met many of our scientists and graduate students to learn about how to turn an interest in birds into a career [...]
For a few weeks now we’ve been looking forward to a major milestone in our eBird project: the addition of our 100 millionth bird observation. 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 [...]
It’s an exciting time to be in field biology—the naturalists of today have more tools at their disposal than ever before. To learn how to use those tools, a group of Cornell students have been spending this summer in the field; and Abby McBride, a summer writing intern, accompanied them in the field to write the [...]
Our eBird online checklist program is racing toward a major landmark—100 million bird observations. We’re only about a half-million observations away, and while that may sound like a lot, the pace of contributions is so fast that we’ll probably pass the milestone in late August. If you already use eBird, or if you’re interested in [...]
It’s been a little over a year since Olivia Bouler came to visit the Lab and taught an arts workshop for local kids. Olivia made headlines during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, when she raised more than $200,000 for wildlife by painting pictures of birds. Since then, she hasn’t looked back, taking her [...]
Science editor Gus Axelson is just back from a tour of eastern Hungary sponsored by Swarovski Optik. (Look for his story about bird conservation in Hungary to appear in a future issue of Living Bird.) As Gus returned to the world of American Redstarts and other brilliant warblers, he turned his attention to a more [...]
