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 [...]
The Cornell Lab’s Celebrate Urban Birds project will host an Arts and Nature Workshop in Ithaca, New York on February 1–2, 2012. We’re awarding a limited number of travel scholarships to attend. The workshop will be bilingual (English and Spanish), and project leader Karen Purcell encourages Latino and other underserved youth to apply. “We are [...]
As you’re making your lists and checking them twice, consider holiday gifts that give twice—thoughtful gifts that are fun to receive and also help birds by supporting conservation, research, and education here at the Cornell Lab. We’ve put together a varied list of gift suggestions—from apps on your phone to trips into the field—that will delight [...]
The Big Year movie opened last night, and audiences poured in to watch Jack Black, Steve Martin, and Owen Wilson race around the countryside wielding binoculars. The birds and bird names came thick and fast—and I’m sure some people wondered how anyone learns to identify so many of anything. But like anything, it’s mainly practice—and [...]
The Big Year movie hits theaters on Friday. We’re looking forward to it, and regardless of whether Owen Wilson, Jack Black, or Steve Martin really find what they’re looking for (hint: this is Hollywood, so I think we’ll find they’re searching for something bigger than birds), we’re taking this opportunity to review what bird watching [...]
Many bird watchers have a special love for hummingbirds—there’s just so much power and personality packed in that tiny bundle of feathers. Each summer, we get inquiries from people who notice these little dynamos have gone missing from their feeders. But rest assured (barring extreme natural events such as the Arizona fires we wrote about [...]
In a year that started with six of southeastern Arizona’s driest months on record, wildfires have burned nearly a million acres of mountain forests in the state. Though fire is an integral part of this western ecosystem, the burned areas are so large this year that the region’s incredible diversity of hummingbirds may be short [...]
A Common Grackle released after a banding demonstration at last year’s Migration Celebration. This coming Saturday is International Migratory Bird Day, and people all over the Western Hemisphere will be celebrating the miracle of bird migration. So on the same day our two World Series of Birding teams (the Redheads and Anti-Petrels) spend 24 hours [...]
