Sarah MacLean didn’t know a lot about falcons when she entered an art contest sponsored by the Third International Festival of Falconry last year. All that changed when she was selected as a finalist and won a 10-day trip to the United Arab Emirates to attend the festival in December. During the trip she met [...]
The only bird species unique to the state of Florida is the endangered Florida Scrub-Jay—and this week, new research took a step forward in devising ways to protect the 5,000 or so birds that remain. The work was published in the scientific journal Biology Letters on Wednesday and appeared in online news today and in a press [...]
We’re steadily working to improve the offerings in our All About Birds online species guide. It’s our goal to eventually feature detailed ID information, photos, natural history, cool facts, sound recordings, and videos for all 700+ birds that live in North America. Right now we have basic information for some 580 species, and we’re [...]
When the gavel fell last week at the auction of John James Audubon’s “The Birds of America” the price for the rare first edition was almost $8 million—the third highest sum ever paid at auction for a book. But what a book! Its phenomenal size and heft simply doesn’t come through in photos, but the 435 [...]
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 [...]
Scientists working in Haiti have obtained the first-ever photos of an endangered Black-capped Petrel chick—a little ball of gray fluff that was discovered at its nest inside a mountaintop cave. The finding helps answer questions about this secretive species’ life cycle. These crow-sized seabirds nest only in the Caribbean and feed as far away as [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In addition to our suggestions for 12 gifts that give back, there’s a gorgeous new book on the shelves called Science on Ice, by Chris Linder. It’s the story of four scientific expeditions to the polar regions—and the video above previews the first chapter, on the life of Antarctica’s Adelie Penguins. In addition to Linder’s [...]
