Science editor Gus Axelson recently posted about how the warblers of Europe don’t exactly measure up to our spectacular American warblers. That got the attention of Wesley Hochachka, assistant director of our Bird Population Studies program. Wes is an avid birder and has spent plenty of time in the field in both North America [...]
It’s coming up on a month since Big Red started laying eggs at our Red-tailed Hawk cam on the Cornell University campus. With an incubation time of 28-35 days, that means the first egg could hatch anytime starting this weekend—so we’re having a contest to see who can guess the time that the first chick [...]
One of our most popular Facebook posts each week is our bird quiz—and our new sponsor, Bob’s Red Mill, is about to make it even better. Watch the video above to hear Bob himself explain what the Bob’s Red Mill BirdSmarts Challenge is all about. Each week we post a photo (or sometimes something trickier, [...]
We’re almost ready to start our second season of March Migration Madness—but we need your help to pick the last four competitors. We’re holding a tournament on our Facebook page, in which 16 of North America’s favorite birds take turns going head to head, throughout March. You can vote for your favorite, and the bird [...]
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 [...]
All through our lives we draw inspiration from our elders, but there comes a point when we can turn around and start drawing inspiration from the young people coming up behind us. At a recent meeting of the Ohio Young Birders Club, we had a chance to hear from Rachael Butek, a recent high-school graduate [...]
March. To much of the country it’s a massive basketball tournament, but to bird watchers it’s an equally frenzied run-up to spring. Right now, the first birds are dribbling back in to their summer ranges—grackles, blackbirds, phoebes, and swallows—but soon it’ll be a full court press of warblers, thrushes, shorebirds, orioles, and more. We think [...]
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, [...]
A recent article in Living Bird magazine posed the above question. In author Mel White’s case there were two frontrunners: the Andean Cock-of-the-rock, which tends to jump onto the list of anyone who’s ever seen a picture of one, and the much more obscure Bornean Bristlehead. White tells the story of how he was lucky [...]
