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 [...]
