New online-learning offerings are the latest additions to the Cornell Lab’s collection of educational materials. The options now range from live, one-hour webinars with an expert ornithologist all the way to an in-depth, college-level correspondence course with a 1,200-page textbook. If you enjoy watching and learning about birds, you might like the chance to investigate [...]
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 [...]
(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 [...]
(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 [...]
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 [...]
In a talk last night that began with a song and ended with a poem, Richard Crossley described how the innovative format in his new identification guide coalesced from pieces of a lifetime spent birding. Crossley’s new guide has been called revolutionary and overwhelming (its pros and cons have been reviewed extensively). Each page bombards [...]
Congratulations to everyone who took Photo Quiz 4. No one had much trouble picking out the stockier, thicker-billed Philadelphia Vireo amid the warblers on display—a clear example of the value of size and shape in picking out differences in similarly colored birds. (See our free video series Inside Birding for more on how to ID [...]
It’s nearly winter, and those of you lucky enough to live near some beaches or mudflats probably enjoy gazing out over motley assortments of shorebirds like this one. Until you can get outside, though, cast your eyes over this photo and help us answer the question: How many species are in this photo? (Of course, [...]
