September 2018 Newsletter
Dear Members of Chairman’s Council
Fall has arrived in Ithaca and just this week we saw a Cooper’s Hawk, heron, and Kingfisher on the pond.
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:
The complete list is on the Chairman’s Council website.
October 15, 2018 Paul C. Mundinger Distinguished Lectureship featuring Gail Patricelli
October 22 – 26, 2018 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)
January 28 – February 3, 2019 Wakulla Springs, FL
March 20-24, 2019 Council Trip to Florida, including a trip to Archbold Biological Station
May 31 – June 5, 2019 Duluth, MN Trip
June 2019 Weekend at Sapsucker Woods
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)
January 23 – February 2, 2020 Chairman’s Council Trip to the Amazon
Please contact Melissa Walker (607-254-2118 or Melissa.walker@cornell.edu) if you are interested in joining us on a trip.
As you can see above, we now have links to the 2019 Chairman’s Council trip websites (Florida and Cape May, NJ). Many of you have contacted us expressing interest in one or both trips so please contact Greg Lopez (greg@ventbird.com or 800/328-VENT or 512/328-5221) for more information. If you would like to register for the trip(s), the registration form can be found online. I will be mailing hard copies of these itineraries and registration forms early next week. We are now working on the itinerary for the Amazon trip; we hope to send that to you in the next few months along with information on the Fall 2020 trip.
What’s New at the Lab?
Each month we feature news from around the Lab; here are a few highlights:
Some of you may have read the Helmeted Hornbill article in the last issue of National Geographic. The following two segments were produced by Daniel Sheire, one of our multimedia producers at the Lab, and the National Geographic digital media group that was released in coordination with the magazine article. Both of these pieces have been translated by National Geographic into several other languages for distribution by regional partners.
Casque: https://vimeo.com/286569110/ce10ba357a
Nesting: https://vimeo.com/286569121/22c3ed2262
Finally, below is a link and password to the video that was produced by the Lab of Ornithology.
Helmeted Hornbill (2018)
https://vimeo.com/272359502
Password: hbill
This video and story project was spearheaded by the Cornell Lab with generous assistance from the Robert F. Schumann Foundation. We’re sharing this video footage with local Southeast Asian communities to spark action to save the Helmeted Hornbill from extinction.
Recently, the Elephant Listening Program was featured in a Cornell Chronicle article: AI speeds effort to protect endangered elephants. The article focuses on how new developments in machine learning are allowing us to analyze sound faster and with higher accuracy.
Impact Story
We rely on your Chairman’s Council gifts to enhance our dedicated funds so we can seize conservation opportunities and address time-sensitive threats to biodiversity as they arise. Each month we share an impact story with you to thank you for your continued support.
One of these projects that receives dedicated funds, annual unrestricted funds, and grant money is the work that Orin Robinson is doing with Tricolored Blackbirds. These birds have been disappearing from California’s wetlands since the 1930’s. Previous attempts to address this loss have failed due to a lack of a reliable evidence of a population trend, or information about what might be driving it. Tricolored Blackbirds are challenging to study; they do not reliably breed or overwinter in the same sites year after year, so it is difficult to know where to monitor colonies in any given year. With the support from Carol and Russ Faucett, we partnered with UC Davis and California Audubon to generate the first population analysis for Tricolored Blackbirds. We used year-round observations in eBird, leveraging the ability of eBirders to submit checklists from any location and maximized the spatial coverage of our data relative to other past field studies. We combined eBird observational data with existing banding and nesting data to show that Tricolored Blackbird populations have likely declined by 34% over the last ten years. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife cited our work as the best available science and recommended the listing of the species under the California Endangered Species Act. At a hearing on April 19 our research (in press in Biological Conservation) was heavily cited, and the vote was 4-0 in favor of listing the species as threatened! We now hope to work with our partners in California to help guide and inform a Recovery Plan, and continue to make an impact on the conservation of this iconic species.
For other news around the Lab, please see our August staff newsletter (The CLUE).
Your personal contacts at the Lab:
A Lab staff listing is available on the Chairman’s Council website.
Bramble Klipple, Senior Director of Development 607-254-1105 bck42@cornell.edu
Scott Sutcliffe, Director of Individual Giving 607-254-2424 sas10@cornell.edu
Melissa Walker, Program Coordinator 607-254-2118 melissa.walker@cornell.edu
Thank you for everything you do to support the Lab, birds, and conservation. We so appreciate your commitment to our mission.
We look forward to working with you in the coming year, and please let us know if you are planning a visit to the Lab!
Best regards,
Melissa
Melissa Walker
Chairman’s Council Program Coordinator
Major Gifts Associate
607-254-2118
melissa.walker@cornell.edu