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 [...]
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 [...]
There’s a clear split in public opinion about The Big Year. While typical moviegoers basically yawned a collective yawn, bird watchers generally saw it as a sweet, gentle movie with refreshing care paid to the details (see comments on our overall review and detailed review for more reactions). So we thought it would be interesting [...]
It’s not every day you get a chance to look back in time at a bird that probably no longer exists. But Cornell Lab of Ornithology scientists were able to do that with the spectacular Imperial Woodpecker of Mexico, when researcher Martjan Lammertink tracked down the only known film footage ever taken of this raven-sized [...]
“These are happy birds—and they want to help you learn,” writes one reviewer about “My Bird World,” a collection of four interactive bird games that teach children about 24 species of North American birds. The game was co-produced by Five Ravens, the digital division of Birdcage Press, and the Cornell Lab for use on the [...]
After watching The Big Year on Friday, our group convened to hash out what we thought. We liked the movie a lot, but as we talked about nitpicky details and larger themes, the reactions were wide-ranging. Among our group was one person with a life list over 3,000 species, several more experts, some casual birders, [...]
