July/August 2019 Newsletter

Dear Members of Chairman’s Council,

Greetings from Sapsucker Woods!

Space is still available, if you would like to attend the 2019 Cape May trip. We have one cabin left on the Amazon trip; please let me know if you would like me to hold the cabin for you. I hope you saw my email last month announcing a Birds and Wine trip in the fall of 2020. In case you missed it, the itinerary is attached.

As always, please let us know if you are interested in visiting the Lab – we would love to arrange a personal tour!

Upcoming Trips and Events:
September 25 – 29, 2019                                          Council Trip to Cape May, NJ
October 2019                                                                Little St. Simons Island (please contact LSSI’s group sales representative, Shana Love, at 912-634-5382, or toll-free at 1-888-733-5774)
October 9-19, 2019                                                     Galapagos
January 23 – February 2, 2020                              Chairman’s Council Trip to the Amazon – this trip is currently sold out
October 10-15, 2020                                                  Chairman’s Council Trip to Carmel Valley and Monterey for Birds and Wine (888-990-5552 or conservationtours@rockjumperbirding.com)
Spring 2021                                                                   Chairman’s Council Trip to Costa Ric

*Please visit the Chairman’s Council website for more events

Recent News from Around the Lab

On Wednesday, August 21 at 1:00 p.m. EDT, Bird Cams will be hosting a California Condor Live Chat with Molly Astell, Erin Arnold, and David Meyer. To join the discussion, please visit the California Condor cam site.

In July, we hosted the 11^th annual Young Birders Event with 17 students (age range 14-17) from as far away as Brazil and China. Students were exposed to a variety of careers ranging from evolutionary biology, education, application development, and big data science. Birding highlights included crippling views of Cerulean Warbler at eye level, Virginia Rails at our feet, and making audio recordings of dozens of species in the forests south of Ithaca. This amazing group of students is already actively involved in a variety of projects from studying Northern Goshawks in Idaho, to publishing a book on the birds of Goiás, Brazil, to studying the genetics of feral pigeons across the United States. We look forward to having several of these students join us as undergraduates. Attached is a photo of the group.

In late June, 33 people from the Lab attended the annual American Ornithological Society’s (AOS) meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. AOS awarded three early-career scientists who have shown outstanding promise in their research areas, and this year it was a clean sweep for the Cornell Lab. Two current Cornell Lab postdocs (Karan Odom and Kyle Horton) were given the Young Professionals award and one recent postdoc (David Toews) was awarded the Early Investigator award. All three were invited to give plenary talks: Odom spoke about her research into female bird song, Horton discussed the latest developments in radar ornithology, and Toews talked about warbler hybridization, highlighted by an account of his discovery of the first-known “triple-hybrid” warbler last spring.

This year AOS celebrated women and gender diversity. For many women and trans and non-binary people, gender historically has been a barrier to full participation in the sciences. This year our Conservation Media Program worked with the AOS to produce short videos of contemporary ornithologists telling the stories of themselves as scientists. These videos were shown each day during plenary sessions at the meeting. Objectives were to highlight a diversity of scientists, to emphasize that diversity is welcome and indispensable in ornithology, and to advance diversity and inclusion as a hallmark of the AOS and its annual meetings. Our videos made a significant impact on meeting attendees.
Click here to access password protected videos
Password: AOS_D1v3rs1ty*06

Save the date: October Big Day is on October 19, 2019.

For more information on these programs or projects, please contact me directly (melissa.walker@cornell.edu or 607-254-2118).

Impact Statement

Each month, we are pleased to share how your annual gifts are making a real impact. The following project receives a hybrid of funding from grants, restricted gifts and support from annual gifts.

In the last decade, bird migration research has exploded, primarily because of fundamental advances in remote sensing and analytical technologies. The BirdCast and BirdVox projects have been beneficiaries of these advances, both making major strides in aeroecology (the study of functions, interactions, and biological importance of the Earth’s lower atmosphere) and ecoacoustics (the study of sound, its roles and its relevance in ecological processes across a broad range of scales, from individuals to communities, habitat patches to biomes, and seconds to decades, respectively). With the power of “Big Data” analytical methods that used cloud computing, machine learning and listening, and statistics, the Lab has made and published on breakthroughs in both of these disciplines:

We can characterize bird migration on radar in near real-time, analyzing radar data collected over the last two and a half decades to the present;
We can forecast bird migration with high confidence, accuracy and precision up to two weeks in advance;
We can automatically evaluate, detect, classify, and report flight calls of nocturnally migrating birds;
We are beginning to integrate radar, acoustic, eBird, and other sources to produce the most comprehensive accounting of the most dynamic periods of birds’ lives: migration.
We are also taking these scientific and research advances and linking them directly into conservation actions, such as producing “Lights Out” alerts to alleviate hazards birds face from light pollution, creating the next generation of bird aircraft strike hazard models to help pilots avoid collisions with birds. In addition, we are extending the range of acoustic monitoring networks by increasing their efficiency in detecting background noise to detect presence of animals and changes in communication behavior that can be used to keep animals from harm’s way. These projects have outreach through major media outlets including cinematic, Internet, paper, and audio media. We also have partners that are diverse and strong, including the National Science Foundation, Leon Levy Foundation, New York University, University of Massachusetts, Amazon Web Services, Google, NASA, and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center among others.

For other news around the Lab, please see our July staff newsletter (The CLUE).

Your personal contacts at the Lab:
A Lab staff listing is available on the Chairman’s Council website.

Melissa Walker, Program Coordinator 607-254-2118 melissa.walker@cornell.edu
Mary Guthrie, Director of Major Gifts 607-254-2157 msg21@cornell.edu

Thank you for everything you do to support the Lab, birds, and conservation. We so appreciate your commitment to our mission.

We hope to see you at an upcoming event or trip!

Best regards,

Melissa

Melissa Walker
Chairman’s Council Program Coordinator
Major Gifts Associate
607-254-2118
melissa.walker@cornell.edu