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 [...]
The 2011 State of the Birds report was released today by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. This year’s report focused on putting some specifics to the idea of the value of public lands. The effort was coordinated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and involved scientists from the Cornell Lab, the U.S. Geological [...]
About 400 people piled into the Visitor Center at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology on Saturday. Maybe half of them were kids—tots in strollers, gangly 6-year-olds, a boy scout troop—and they had come to see a conservationist not much older than themselves: Olivia Bouler. Olivia’s pledge to help during last year’s BP oil spill caught [...]
Back in the olden days, “Hello world!” was the traditional greeting whenever anyone logged onto the Internet for the very first time. And this week we had our own “Hello world” moment when we launched the Cornell Lab’s Facebook page. http://twitter.com/#!/lab_of_O/status/2352832678199296 If you’re a Facebook user, we hope you’ll stop by our page, “Like” us, [...]
Two days ago, the folks at eBird put out a call-to-action to birders who live near the Gulf Coast and want to help with the oil spill response. Today eBird launched a Google gadget that anyone can use on their website, blog, or Google homepage to explore recent sightings of 10 vulnerable species along the [...]
