From Abert’s Towhee to Zone-tailed Hawk, the Master Set presents the most complete vocal repertoires for 735 species of North American birds, available in downloadable MP3 files. A photo of each species is included. Examples of unusual vocalizations include the dawn song of the Acadian Flycatcher, the flight song of the Yellow-breasted Chat, and the display flight of the American Woodcock. Listeners may be surprised to learn that even common backyard birds, such as the Black-capped Chickadee, Carolina Wren, and Tufted Titmouse, make a variety of sounds they may not have known about. The Master Set also includes the voice of the now-extinct Bachman’s Warbler and the bubbling, popping courtship sounds of Gunnsion Sage-Grouse, an imperiled species.

The Master Set is now available at a special introductory rate of $49.99, a savings of $10.00 off the regular price.

“From 1929 to this very day, the Macaulay Library has a long tradition of collaboration with wildlife sound recordists,” says Macaulay Library audio curator Greg Budney. “We’re celebrating the talent and dedication of all the citizen scientists down through the years whose work makes up the bulk of these collections.”

Audio engineer Matt Young, who completed the work on the two collections, says the Master Set was created as a definitive North American reference guide for birders, researchers, and students. “These are living, breathing productions,” Young said. “We’ll always be looking to update the collections as new and better recordings come into the archive.”

Budney adds, “We hope these sounds motivate more people to work for the protection of birds so that these wonderful voices may still be heard by generations to come. Better yet, we hope these recordings inspire people to get to know the birds that are still alive for us to see and enjoy.”

These new sound collections are available in the Macaulay Library online store, where you can hear several more audio samples.

By Shailee Shah

A chameleon’s tongue, a bee’s flight, a cheetah’s chase, a kingfisher’s dive, a manakin’s “singing” wings—many animals go about their lives doing things in the blink of an eye. There is a whole secret world of the fast-moving that remains to be explored and understood with the aid of high-speed videography.

I had my first opportunity to record with a high-speed camera over spring break in southern California. I was one of six Cornell students in a 10-day recording workshop taught by the Cornell Lab’s Macaulay Library. Though I had seen plenty of slow-motion film before, it was mind-blowing to watch and record animals moving around at normal speed, and then play back the sequence in slow motion.

A normal video or movie plays at 24–30 frames per second (fps), which is enough for our eyes to perceive motion. But animals can move much faster. A hummingbird can beat its wings more than 50 times a second, making it a complete blur to the naked eye.

The high-speed camera we brought, a Sony FS700, can shoot at 240 fps. In a nutshell, this means that it slows down movement by eight times, stretching a second of real time to eight seconds of video. In the clips above, it’s almost magical to see what animals are really doing in the blink of an eye.

For example, driving through the Carrizo Plain—a vast, arid grassland east of San Luis Obispo—looking for pronghorns and Prairie Falcons, we noticed a host of scarab beetles flying about. So we got down on our hands and knees and filmed one taking off from a rock. A quiver of antennae, a sudden unfolding of wings and it was gone, launching itself in the air in a split second. Played back in slow motion, the elegance of the beetle’s flight is revealed as its metallic orange wings fold out, like an entomological Transformer, and it seems to hover its way into the air.

Similarly, some Costa’s Hummingbirds foraging at Joshua Tree National Park prompted us to take high-speed videos of the birds in flight, hovering around bright chuparosa flowers and flying in for a quick sip of nectar. At 240 fps, the camera teases out the circular motion of the wings from the indistinct hum perceived by the naked eye. A kindly employee of the Oasis of Mara visitor center showed us a Costa’s Hummingbird nest right outside an office window. The female kept appearing out of nowhere, shooting in to supply her two young with regurgitated food and then taking off again. Shot at high speed, her graceful landing was the icing on top of a whole morning spent desperately trying to film these darting, three-inch-long organisms that act more like insects than birds.

Even “slower” shorebirds like avocets, whimbrels, and egrets perform predatory maneuvers that defy human speeds. Watching a Snowy Egret foraging on the beach, we were taken aback every time it managed to nab a springtail from the hundreds jumping about all around it. Slowed down with high-speed video, the egret’s split-second process of singling out a morsel, correcting aim, and grabbing it is revealed.

Needless to say, we were all blown away by these beautiful videos. And what makes this technology even cooler is how it can be applied to the scientific study of things like the feeding morphology of hummingbirds and shorebirds.

Our human sensory organs are by no means perfect. There are colors we cannot see, sounds we cannot hear, textures we cannot feel, speeds we cannot process. Technology like high-speed videography can help make these phenomena accessible to our sensory range and uncover the secrets of this hidden world, an opportunity that we were very fortunate to have as students on this expedition.

(Shailee Shah ’14 is a Cornell senior majoring in Biology and English. The expedition was organized by the Cornell Lab’s Macaulay Library and led by Benjamin M. Clock, Martha Fischer, and Larry Arbanas. Student participants included Mary Margaret Ferraro, Nathaniel Young, Andy Johnson, Teresa Pegan, and Luke Seitz. In addition to videography the students learned audio recording techniques and helped gather recordings of key species for the Macaulay Library archive.)

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology bestowed its prestigious Arthur A. Allen Award for 2013 to Dr. Robert Ridgely, at a ceremony May 14 at the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library. The award, named for Cornell Lab founder Arthur Allen, was established in 1967 to honor those who have made significant contributions to ornithology by making it accessible to the general public.

“No individual alive today has contributed more to the understanding and widespread public appreciation of South American birds than Bob Ridgely,” said Cornell Lab director John Fitzpatrick. “Through his own pioneering explorations in the Andean wilderness, his meticulously researched books and articles, and his relentless pursuit of conservation milestones in Ecuador and beyond, Bob embodies everything that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology strives to achieve and support. ”

“As founder of the Cornell Lab, Arthur Allen broke important ground by blurring the lines between amateur naturalists and professional scientists,” Fitzpatrick said. “Today we honor Allen’s vision by recognizing other leaders who help build this vital bridge, and nobody does this better than Robert Ridgely.”

Dr. Ridgely is an expert on Neotropical birds and coauthor of The Birds of Panama, The Birds of Ecuador, and The Birds of South America. Ridgely and fellow birder John Moore discovered a new species of antpitta in Ecuador in 1997.  Subsequently named the Jocotoco Antpitta, it has gangly blue legs, a white cheek patch, and vocalizations that range from a soft hooting to a sharp bark. The endangered bird was given the scientific name Grallaria ridgelyi to honor Dr. Ridgely.

Jocotoco Antpitta by Patty McGann via Wikipedia

Listen to the bird’s call and song, recorded by Dr. Ridgely in 1997. The recording is archived in the Lab’s Macaulay Library collection.

Ridgely is the cofounder and president of Fundación de Conservación Jocotoco, which runs 10 nature reserves in Ecuador. He has worked tirelessly to promote bird conservation during his tenure at the Academy of Natural Sciences and the American Bird Conservancy, continuing to the present in his role as Honorary President of the World Land Trust-US.

“Dr. Robert Ridgely is a trailblazer in conservation as well as one the world’s foremost field ornithologists and tropical researchers,” says Dr. Paul Salaman, Chief Executive Officer of World Land Trust-US. “His no-nonsense approach to conservation has resulted in the purchase of private lands for the protection of birds and their environment, producing real world results.”

Ridgely has been awarded the Eisenmann Medal by the Linnaean Society of New York (2001); the Chandler Robbins Award from the American Birding Association (2006); and the Ralph W. Schreiber Conservation Award by the American Ornithologists’ Union (2011).

Past Winners of the Arthur A. Allen Award include Roger Tory Peterson, Alexander Wetmore, Sir Peter Scott, Alexander Skutch, Tom Cade, Victor Emanuel, and Linda Macaulay.

(Image: 2013 Allen Award recipient Robert Ridgely, center, with two past recipients, Linda Macaulay and Victor Emanuel. Photo courtesy John Fitzpatrick.)

Click image for a larger version. (Right-click to open in a new window if you’d like to have the photo visible while you read the answers below.)

The new Crossley ID Guide: Raptors came out in April. Crossley’s innovative technique of cramming lots of photos onto a page seems to work especially well with such large birds and open spaces. They force the reader to assimilate details of shape and size while limiting the amount to which we can obsess over fine feather details (just like we have to do in the field).

This new book turns 15 “mystery” plates into a hands-on ID workshop interspersed throughout the pages dedicated to individual species.  It’s a book that invites you to keep turning pages, luring your subconscious into calling out names almost as soon as your eye passes over them.

The photo above is the third of our three examples of plates from the book (the other two are mystery hawks on the prairie, and a Sharp-shinned Hawk workout). This one takes a look from an unusual perspective, looking down at these normally high-flying birds. Can you tell how many species are here? Which is which? Take your best guesses, and then scroll down for answers, tips, and commentary provided by our own raptor expert, Brian Sullivan, an eBird project leader and a coauthor of the Crossley guide.

Scroll down when you’re ready to read Brian’s answers:

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This is one of my favorite plates in the book, not only because it provides a really interesting perspective on these birds, but the scenery is spectacular. Raptors are often seen flying overhead, especially hawkwatching sites in the flatlands. But on ridgetops you can often see raptors from above with great regularity. Topside views offer an interesting and exciting perspective, and they can be an ID challenge if you’re not familiar with this kind of viewing. Shape and flight style traits still hold useful, but plumage traits may still be necessary for some identifications. See how you did with the species in this photo:

1. First-year Swainson’s Hawk. Dark brown on top with blackish flight feathers and tail, pale uppertail coverts, and obvious buffy fringes to upperwing coverts. Note long, tapered wings.
2. First-year Swainson’s Hawk. Dark brown on top with blackish flight feathers, pale uppertail coverts, pale eye-line, and faint buffy fringes to upperwing coverts. Note pointed wing tips and the variation in the amount of pale fringing above. This bird has virtually none, but quiz bird #1 has a lot. This is typical variation in juvenile Swainson’s Hawks.
3. First-spring Golden Eagle. Dark brown on top with a golden wash on the head, and a white-based tail. Note that first-years in spring have a broad fade to the upperwing coverts that resembles the narrow, pale mottled upperwing bar of older birds. Also note shorter inner primary still growing in. Note the long, broad wings held in a dihedral.
4. Adult Bald Eagle. Unmistakable, uniformly dark with a white head and tail, and large yellow bill!
5. Adult Golden Eagle. Overall brown above with paler mottling along the upperwings, a golden head, and grayish bands on the tail. Note that in bright sunlight, grayish areas can look white. Golden Eagles are long-winged and long-tailed, with small heads compared with Bald Eagles. In strong sunlight, the Golden’s hackles on the nape can appear white, so beware confusion with adult Bald Eagle (believe it or not!).
6. First-year Red-shouldered Hawk. Brownish on top overall with translucent primary “commas.” Note squared off wings and somewhat long tail with indistinct banding. Red-shouldered Hawks show thin wings hunched forward in a glide.
7. First-year Northern Goshawk. Pale underneath with heavy dark streaking throughout. Note somewhat short wings that are very broad but taper at the hands; also note the broad chest and long tail.
8. Osprey. Blackish on top with a white head and black eyeline. Note white underbody and long, narrow wings. This is an adult based on the pure white chest and lack of dark streaking on crown.
9. First-year Sharp-shinned Hawk. Distant accipiters are hard, but this one has the classic field marks for Sharp-shinned Hawk. Dark brown on top with faintly banded tail. Note long, narrow tail, short, broad wings, and small head.
10. Immature Bald Eagle. Dark brown overall with blackish flight feathers. Note significant whitish mottling in tail and uneven secondaries; this denotes a subadult. Also, note the browner back with darker upperwing coverts. First-year birds are even toned throughout the back and upperwings.
11. Adult Red-shouldered Hawk. Plumage is a beautiful rusty underneath with a brown head, and blackish on top with clean, narrow white bands throughout the flight and tail feathers, and whitish comma-shaped primary windows.
12. Adult Red-shouldered Hawk. Rusty underneath with a brown head, and blackish on top with clean, narrow white bands throughout the flight and tail feathers, and whitish comma-shaped primary windows. Note reddish “shoulders” of adult. A strikingly patterend hawk, especially when seen from above.
13. First-year Broad-winged Hawk. Brown on top with slightly paler primaries, faint pale mottling on upperwings, and indistinctly banded tail with darker band at tip. Note compact structure with stocky, pointed wings and large head. Tail appears somewhat long on first-years.
14. Adult Red-tailed Hawk. Dark brown on top with a bright rufous tail, and a golden wash to the head. Rufous uppertail coverts rather than whitish are much more common on the western race than the eastern.
15. First-year Red-tailed Hawk. Brown on top with pale upper tail coverts and pale mottling on the upperwings. Note the long but broad, bulging wings that taper slightly at the tips. First-year Red-tailed Hawks show pale squarish wing panels on the outer wing that contrast with the darker brown secondaries. It takes a year to acquire the red tail of adults.
16. First-year Cooper’s Hawk. Dark brown on top with faintly banded tail similar to a goshawk, but lacks the pale mottling along the upperwings, and pale eyeline. Note long tail with obvious white tip, short, broad wings, and noticeable head projection. Wings and tail are slightly longer in relation to other accipiters.
17. Osprey. Note blackish topside with white crown, and very long, narrow wings. Aged as adult based on lack of pale fringes on upperwing coverts.
18. First-year Northern Goshawk. Brown on top with tawny-streaked nape, pale mottling on upperwing coverts, whitish eyeline, and long banded tail. Note broad wings compared to other accipiters.
19. First-year Broad-winged Hawk. Brown overall on top with slightly paler primaries, and indistinctly banded tail with darker band on tip. Note stocky tapered wings and big-headed look.

(Plate image courtesy Princeton University Press; Brian Sullivan photo by Jessie Barry.)

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  Bicknell's Thrushes are rare Northeastern songbirds that winter in the Caribbean.

  

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  The entire population winters in the Caribbean, where potential habitat (green, from McFarland et al. 2013) is scarce.

  

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  Fieldworkers surveying inside Sierra de Bahoruco national park discovered extensive illegal clearings.

  

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  Bicknell's Thrushes live in cloud forest (red), which is threatened by agricultural expansion (yellow).

  

Surveys for a rare North American songbird are shedding light on illegal forest clearing in the Dominican Republic, according to researchers from the Vermont Center for Ecostudies and Grupo Jaragua. The ongoing cutting in Sierra de Bahoruco National Park threatens some of Hispaniola’s last remaining undisturbed cloud forest. The park’s forests are a winter home to many North American migrants, refuge for 32 endemic Hispaniolan species, and an important source of freshwater for the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

The deforestation was discovered as researchers surveyed for Bicknell’s Thrushes in the national park. These small, delicately spotted birds have flutelike songs and breed in mountaintop forests from New York and New England through Quebec and Nova Scotia. The entire population spends winters in the Caribbean, mostly on Hispaniola with lesser numbers in parts of Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico.

“It’s a cruel irony that as our Grupo Jaragua colleagues conducted surveys to document where Bicknell’s Thrush occur, they ended up documenting severe habitat loss in one of the species’ important strongholds,” said Chris Rimmer, director of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. “They were literally counting thrushes while watching the cloud forest disappear.”

Because of severe population declines, Bicknell’s Thrush has been called the most threatened migrant songbird in northeastern North America and is under review for listing by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under the Endangered Species Act.

Cutting in the park has been going on since at least 2009, said Yolanda Leon of the Dominican nonprofit Grupo Jaragua. To date, an estimated 30 square miles of forest inside the park boundaries has been cleared. Surveys this winter indicated that clearing was creeping farther upslope and into the sensitive cloud forest.

“A lot of people get confused because they see a huge expanse of pine forest [higher in the park] and they say ‘Oh, the forest is fine,’” Leon said. “But we are looking at this fringe of forest that has a very specific band of occurrence, where the clouds meet the forest. It’s a very complex, beautiful forest, where you have a lot of migratory birds, and a lot of endemic birds.”

In this 2009 aerial photo, agricultural clearing along the park's southern boundary is already evident. Red dots mark locations where the survey team found ongoing clearing. Map courtesy Yolanda Leon, Grupo Jaragua.

In November 2012, Leon and two colleagues, Esteban Garrido and Jesús Almonte, found high concentrations of wintering Bicknell’s Thrushes near the regions of Las Abejas and Los Arroyos on the mountain’s southern slopes. When they returned for more surveys in the first week of April, they discovered that patches of forest had been cleared to the ground. Some had already been planted with avocado, potatoes, beets, carrots, and beans. Elsewhere, cows grazed and makeshift ovens were turning felled timber into charcoal.

Deforestation is a major problem on Hispaniola, where economic conditions force many people to clear forests to collect firewood and grow crops. However, much of the current clearing appears to be a well-funded project of several influential Dominican landowners rather than subsistence agriculture, Leon said. They have instituted a sharecropping system, encouraging Haitian immigrants to clear and farm the land in return for a small share of the harvest.

Complicating the issue is the fact that the southern boundary of the park, though it appears on maps, is not marked on the ground. “A lot of people, they don’t want to get into trouble,” Leon said. “But if they don’t see a marker… they think they are just using fallow land.”

The cloud forest is one of the most important and threatened habitat types in Hispaniola. Sierra de Bahoruco is a part of the Jaragua-Bahoruco-Enriquillo UNESCO biosphere reserve and is a center of biodiversity for birds, amphibians, orchids, and other species. Beyond Bicknell’s Thrushes, other species that depend on the park’s forests are the globally endangered Black-capped Petrel and La Selle Thrush, and more than 30 unique species such as the Hispaniolan Parrot, Hispaniolan Trogon, Hispaniolan Crossbill, and Golden Swallow (more info in a BirdLife International PDF fact sheet).

Preserving intact forest is directly important for humans, too. “The montane forest is the sponge that captures moisture from the clouds. If we don’t have these forests, there’s no freshwater for Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” said Eduardo Iñigo-Elias, who coordinates the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Neotropical Conservation Initiative. The cloud forest of the Sierra de Bahoruco, specifically, feeds the Pedernales River, which forms part of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and supplies towns in both countries.

A separate pressure on the Sierra de Bahoruco’s drier, lower-elevation forests is the harvest of a shrub called guaconejo, or torchwood (Amyris spp.). Fragrant oils contained in the bark put this plant in high demand from the perfume industry, but few sources remain outside of parks, Iñigo-Elias said. Harvesters have begun to freely infiltrate the Dominican Republic’s protected lands, cut the trees, and bring them back to Haiti to ship to France, he said.

The Ministry of the Environment in the Dominican Republic is in charge of enforcing the regulations in national parks, Iñigo-Elias said. Representatives from Grupo Jaragua and Vermont Center for Ecostudies wrote to the ministry and met with staff to describe the situation and express their support for action to curtail the illegal activities. The main goal, according to Leon, is to begin negotiations with the landowners who are underwriting the clearing to arrive at an amicable resolution that protects the park’s lands without unfairly treating the Haitian immigrants hired to do the work.

In the meantime, Grupo Jaragua has launched a Friends of the Sierra de Bahoruco Facebook page (largely in Spanish) for people who want to keep up with developments. They also hope to raise funds to conduct a land occupation study so they can help make effective conservation interventions. The Cornell Lab is a longtime research partner of both Grupo Jaragua and Vermont Center for Ecostudies, and has trained Hispaniolan biologists in mist netting, acoustic surveys, and radio telemetry, and studied threatened species such as the Black-capped Petrel, Golden Swallow, and Bicknell’s Thrush. This work has been made possible by grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to the Cornell Lab.

“This is the wintering ground for so many species that we share with the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” Iñigo-Elias said. “It’s an area of high humanitarian crisis given the lack of freshwater and the lack of fuel. And then on top of that, the last remaining resources are being cut for a few crops. I hope that all involved can come to an agreement that allows the park to do its job in protecting some of these last undisturbed remnants, and continue to provide ecosystem services to the local inhabitants.”

(Images: Bicknell’s Thrush by Pedro Genaro Rodriguez; other photos and maps by Yolanda Leon of Grupo Jaragua.)

Bill Rhein (right), with his friends George and Walter Kohler in the Sierra Madre in 1953, during the first of three expeditions in search of the Imperial Woodpecker.

Living Bird editor Tim Gallagher’s newest book, Imperial Dreams, hit bookstores on Tuesday with its tales of exploring Mexico’s Sierra Madre in pursuit of the largest woodpecker that ever lived. The book has received some great reviews, and Tim will appear on the Diane Rehm show on Thursday, April 25, 2013, to discuss it. Here’s a little bonus material from Tim about William Rhein, a dentist and amateur ornithologist/filmmaker who provided some of Tim’s most important clues:

I’ve always loved the story of William Rhein—the indefatigable Imperial Woodpecker searcher who launched three self-funded expeditions into the vast Sierra Madre of Mexico in the 1950s to try to document these remarkable birds as they hovered even then at the edge of extinction. I sometimes wonder why he did it. Rhein had an excellent income from his dental practice in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; a nice home; and no children, so he and his wife could afford to indulge themselves in every way. But instead he chose to drive south with a few buddies and spend up to two months at a time, roughing it in the outback of Mexico, living on beans, booze, and tortillas.

Of course, it was a great adventure. These guys were World War II veterans, and perhaps they missed the thrills, danger, and sense of camaraderie they’d experienced in combat. And bird study was a lifelong obsession with Rhein. Although he did not have a degree in ornithology, he was an ornithologist to the core—and also a gifted bird photographer and cinematographer. Rhein’s lucrative dental practice provided all the funds and time he needed to do anything he wanted, and the Imperial Woodpecker was the ideal species for an obsessive quest—a bird that had barely been studied and never photographed alive. Perhaps it was the challenge of accomplishing something that had never been done that spurred him on.

In the course of working on my new book, Imperial Dreams, I was fortunate enough to interview two surviving members of Rhein’s expeditions—Frederick K. Hilton (who went with him in 1953) and Dick Heintzelman (who went in 1956)—and they filled me in on the details of the expeditions and shared their photographs with me.

The first thing Rhein did to prepare for his expedition was to visit famed Cornell professor Arthur A. Allen (founder of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology), who had searched for Imperial Woodpeckers in 1946. Allen—along with his wife Elsa and 20-year-old son David—had spent six weeks in Mexico, driving the atrocious mountain roads in a station wagon and a sedan, both laden to the gunwales with camera and sound-recording equipment. They actually located one of the birds, a lone female, but were unable to photograph it or make a sound recording. Allen was generous to Rhein, providing him with maps, advice on where to go, and the names of people to contact in Mexico. He even loaned Rhein a huge parabolic microphone and a wire recorder (an early sound-recording device that recorded sound onto thin steel wire) in case he got a chance to document the bird’s voice, which had also never been done.

Rhein and three of his friends loaded up his Chevy panel truck with all of their gear and headed south in the late spring of 1953, driving all the way from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to the city of Durango, Mexico, some 2,500 miles away. Although they struck out in the first two areas they explored, the men eventually found several Imperial Woodpeckers (including a pair with two young) near Los Laureles, a tiny village in the high country of Durango.

Walter Kohler looks at a fallen tree where seconds earlier three Imperial Woodpeckers had been foraging.

Some of the local people were suspicious of the strange equipment they carried, such as the odd-looking metal parabola, which was bigger around than a sledding disk, and the wire recorder. This was in the early days of the nuclear age, and some of them suspected the Americans were searching for uranium.

The sound-recording equipment proved to be impractical for the job at hand. They brought along six truck batteries to power the setup, which did not allow them the mobility they needed to follow an Imperial Woodpecker closely and record its call—which is too bad; no recording of the bird’s voice exists, and no one has ever had a better chance to record it than Rhein and his friends. They were also unable to take still photographs or film footage on this or their follow-up expedition in 1954.

On his third and final expedition to Mexico in 1956, Rhein finally successfully documented an Imperial Woodpecker, capturing a variety of behaviors on 85 seconds of 16-mm Kodachrome motion-picture film. But unfortunately, the film didn’t meet Rhein’s strict professional standards, and he kept it to himself for decades. He had filmed the segment from the back of a mule as the woodpecker hung around, flying from tree to tree in a circle, and occasionally foraging.

Clips from William Rhein’s 1956 footage of a female Imperial Woodpecker.

The world might very well never have learned about Rhein’s Imperial Woodpecker film if not for the efforts of my colleague Martjan Lammertink, who tracked down Rhein and interviewed him less than two years before his death. Martjan had read a letter in the Cornell archives that Rhein had written to woodpecker researcher James Tanner in the early 1960s, in which he had briefly mentioned the Imperial Woodpecker footage he shot in Mexico. Martjan was living in the Netherlands at the time, but the next time he came to America, he tracked down Rhein at his home in Pennsylvania.

Rhein and his wife greeted Martjan warmly and invited him inside. Later, they sat down in the living room and Rhein set up his old 16-mm projector and screen and began running the film. Martjan had the foresight to turn on a tape recorder as he sat with them as the projector rolled. Pat Leonard at the Cornell Lab has put together some of Rhein’s best footage and used the conversation between Rhein and his wife and Martjan as a voiceover. You can view it here:

I love hearing the comments of Rhein and his wife. Neither of them had viewed the film in decades. As for Martjan, he was stunned. Although it only ran a total of 85 seconds, the film was far better than he could ever have imagined. The bird was easily identifiable and engaged in a variety of behaviors—flying, foraging, hitching up a tree. It holds a goldmine of information about a species that has barely been studied. To this day, it is the only photographic documentation ever made of an Imperial Woodpecker, and its importance cannot be overstated.

(Images courtesy Tim Gallagher. To learn more about the Imperial Woodpecker, visit Tim’s blog.)

(Click image for a larger version)

The new Crossley guide hits bookstores this week, bringing Crossley’s unique approach to the task of helping you identify more raptors—whether they’re familiar, unfamiliar, faraway, backlit, immature, adult, light-morph, dark-morph, soaring, hovering, or sitting.

With raptors for a subject, this guide concerns itself with far fewer species than 2011′s Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds, and the authors have used the extra room well. Crossley has always wanted readers to engage with his books—to puzzle over each plate’s many shapes and patterns as much as they read the ID tips at the bottom of the page.

This new book adds even more of an ID workbook feel than the last guide. Interspersed with the book’s 67 two-page identification spreads are 15 “mystery” plates that challenge readers to put the book’s advice immediately to use in working out identifications.

As an example, check out the one above: you’re out birding on the central prairies, and a host of buteos are circling in the sky. Which is which? Take a close look and see if you can identify each numbered bird (for the smaller specks, try clicking for a larger image). Then scroll down for the answers, provided by Crossley’s coauthor Brian Sullivan, who is an eBird project leader and raptor expert.

Scroll down when you’re ready to read Brian’s answers:

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Answers to the Quiz: by Brian Sullivan

(Tip: right-click on the image above and select “Open link in new window.” Then you’ll have the image next to you as you read the answers instead of scrolling up and down.)

How many species? There are four species in this composite photograph: Ferruginous Hawk, Red-tailed Hawk, Swainson’s Hawk, and Rough-legged Hawk. These are all buteos—large, long-winged birds with rather short tails. These characteristics help them soar efficiently over open country; several species also regularly hover or kite. They have shorter tails than accipiters and broader, rounder wings than either falcons or kites. Bear in mind that most buteos can occur in several color patterns: “light-morph” (generally more common) and “dark-morph” (less common), as well as occasional intermediates.

So which is which? Next, to identify these buteos, focus on subtleties of shape and broad plumage patterns. (Flight style is also key to identification, but that is difficult to discern from still images.) Here are the points to look for in each example:

1. Adult light Ferruginous Hawk. Snow-white underneath with rufous leg feathers, underwing mottling, and upperwing coverts. Light Ferruginous Hawks have long, rather pointed wings and are overall very pale.
2. Adult light Red-tailed Hawk. Pale underneath with dark patagial bars and belly streaks. Virtually all light Red-tailed Hawks have these dark patagial bars (the leading edge of the underwing). Note rufous tint to underside, dark trailing edge to wings, and reddish tint to tail; these denote an adult.
3. First-summer light Red-tailed Hawk. Not all Red-tailed Hawks have red tails! First-years have brown, banded tails. They molt into the red tail during the first summer, as shown in this bird. Brown overall on top. Broad wings with new, darker inner primaries, outer primaries showing first-year paleness, which can look like a window in the wing. Brownish, faintly banded tail with new, reddish adult feathers.
4. First-year light Red-tailed Hawk. Pale underneath with dark patagial bars and bellyband. Lacks the buffy or rufous tint to the underbody, dark trailing edge to the wings, and reddish tail of adult. Shows translucent primaries.
5. First-year dark western Red-tailed Hawk. Broad, somewhat long wings in a full soar. Note that the uniformly brownish body and underwing coverts is an uncommon plumage. Lack of defined trailing edge to wings and reddish tail denote a first-year bird.
6. First-year light western Red-tailed Hawk. Pale underneath with dark patagial bars and belly streaks. Note: translucent primaries and plain buffy coloration denote a first-year bird.
7. Adult intermediate Swainson’s Hawk. This bird shows long, pointed wings in a shallow glide. Swainson’s Hawks usually show pale underwing coverts contrasting with dark grayish flight feathers. This one also shows a dark chest bib and paler belly. Many intermediate adults are mottled on the belly.
8. Adult light Red-tailed Hawk. Pale underneath with dark patagial bars, belly streaks, and reddish tail. Somewhat long but broad wings.
9. Adult dark Ferruginous Hawk. Dark underneath with whitish, plain flight feathers, and minimal dark on wingtips. Wings are long and tapered, but unlike dark Swainson’s, Ferruginous have very pale flight feathers. Dark trailing edge to the wings, rufous overall body plumage with whitish throat, and lack of dark on the tail tip denote adult.
10. Adult female light Rough-legged Hawk. Pale underneath with blackish belly and wrists. Dark trailing edge to the wings and defined dark tail tip denote an adult. The single dark tail band, complete bellyband, and wrist patches denote a female.
11. Adult “Krider’s” Red-tailed Hawk. Pale and nearly unmarked underneath with minimal dark on patagials, reddish and whitish tail, and dark trailing edge to wings. Broad wings slightly tapered in shallow glide is classic Red-tail shape. Krider’s is a pale subspecies of the Red-tailed Hawk that breeds mainly on the northern Great Plains and winters on the southern Great Plains.
12. Third-year light Swainson’s Hawk. Pale underside with dark bib and flight feathers with darker trailing edge to wings and tail. Bib is near complete, and paler outer primaries help denote age. Unlike many buteos, Swainson’s takes three years to acquire full adult plumage. This summer bird is in the process of molting into its adult plumage.
13. First-year light Rough-legged Hawk. Pale underneath with solid blackish belly and wrists, and buffy, unmottled underwing coverts. Dark trailing edge to the wings is ill defined, but appears to have a dark tail tip. Translucent primary panels somewhat visible. First-years and adult females can be difficult to tell apart.
14. Adult light Ferruginous Hawk. Snow-white underneath with rufous leg feathers, underwing mottling, and minimal dark on wingtips. Wings are long and lack bulge along secondaries, body is robust. Compare shape with other light buteos on this page.
15. Adult female light Rough-legged Hawk. Most light Rough-legged Hawks are easily identified by the dark belly and wrist patches that contrast with the overall pale underparts. This is especially true of adult females and immatures. The dark trailing edge to the wings and defined dark tail tip denote an adult. The single dark tail band, rufous underwings, complete bellyband, and wrist patches denote a female.

(Image courtesy Princeton University Press.)

Big Days are intense: Last year, our Team Sapsucker spent all 24 hours of April 27 scouring central and eastern Texas for birds. They had three dozen species on their list before dawn broke, and hit triple digits shortly before 8 a.m. They kept going, adding an average of one species every 11 minutes throughout the day.

To help the rest of us picture what that sort of daylong deluge of birds feels like, we’ve condensed their Big Day into a 4-minute slideshow. Watch and enjoy as the birds flash by!

Curious about which species is which in the slideshow? Refer to the table below—or download a printable PDF. (Note: the slideshow does not show all 264 species, and these photos were not taken on the Big Day itself.)

Species recorded during Big Day but not pictured in slideshow

(Photos courtesy Chris Wood and Tim Lenz.)

(Click image to enlarge)

We were pretty impressed with Richard Crossley’s first bird ID guide when it came out in 2011. So we can’t wait for the next installment: a guide dedicated specifically to raptors, due out in April 2013. Could our excitement have anything to do with his coauthors? Yes it could: they include raptor wizard Jerry Ligouri (author of a guide or two of his own), and the Cornell Lab’s own Brian Sullivan, an eBird project leader.

The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors continues Crossley’s turned-on-its-head approach to bird guides. Instead of putting one or two large, detailed images front and center against a white background, Crossley inundates the reader with photos of the bird in all postures, plumages, and—most importantly—sizes. The birds skitter across a single landscape photo, forcing the reader to pay attention to the most important aspect of identification: size & shape.

This approach is especially well suited to raptors, which you typically see from a long distance away in challenging light. The first thing we learn about raptors is how to tell the shape of a buteo from an accipiter from a falcon. Refining that ability to judge shape is what makes raptor watching an enduring pursuit. Take this sample plate for example—how many jump out immediately as Sharp-shinned Hawks, and how many surprise you?

I asked Brian Sullivan for some tips on this small accipiter, and here’s what he told me:

Distinguishing the accipiters is one of the most challenging aspects of bird identification. Let your eyes roam across these images, and pay particular attention to shape. How do the various shapes translate as the birds get farther away? Sharp-shinned usually shows a relatively small head, a narrow-based, often squarish-tipped tail, and short, stocky, rounded wings. The wings are pressed forward at the wrists, often making Sharp-shinned appear smaller-headed than the other two accipiters, Cooper’s Hawk and Northern Goshawk. Ageing accipiters is often easier than identifying them: first-years are brownish above and streaked brownish below; adults are blue-gray above and barred reddish or (for the goshawk) grayish below.

Keep an eye out here and on our Facebook page for more raptor quizzes from Brian, coming your way in April. And read more about the new Crossley guide as the book tours the major bird watching blogs this week (tip: click through and read to the bottom of the post for a chance to win a great prize package).

(Image courtesy Princeton University Press.)

Our third annual March Migration Madness tournament kicked off on Tuesday, March 12, when the Whooping Crane faced off against the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. After more than 2,700 total votes, the crane stretched its long legs and walked away with the victory. It will reappear in Round 2 against the winner of the American Kestrel vs. Pileated Woodpecker round.

This year’s species roster features more than a few surprises. They were chosen by fans of the many separate projects here at the Cornell Lab. For example, the stately white crane was a write-in candidate chosen by fans of our Facebook page. The sapsucker represented our Sapsucker Woods page, which gives people news about the 220-acre nature preserve where the Cornell Lab has its offices.

Other species in the tournament represent efforts like Project FeederWatch (Tufted Titmouse), NestWatch (Eastern Bluebird), eBird (Swallow-tailed Kite), YardMap (Pileated Woodpecker), and Merlin (er, Merlin). There are even—gasp—a couple of mammals in play this year. They earned their spots representing projects of ours that study (and conserve) whales and African forest elephants. For the whole list, check out this bracket:

Click the image to download a printable version:

To vote, visit our Facebook page each weekday. We’ll post a photo album with photos of the day’s two contenders—just click “Like” on the one you want to win. There’ll be a new matchup each weekday until April 1, when we’ll decide our new “Chirpion.” Thanks for playing!