Thanks everyone for weighing in on our photo quiz! Meanwhile, halfway around the world on Mauritius, recordist Jon Erickson has been unpacking his bags and aiming his microphone at the tamarind tree in his yard. Here’s his first impressions of life in the middle of the Indian Ocean:
On the third morning after arriving on Mauritius, [...]
We got such an enthusiastic response to our first photo quiz that we’ve decided to launch another one. This one’s certainly not a tricky-ID problem—few people would look at these two photos and see two closely related species requiring keen attention to detail to separate.
And yet, they aren’t your everyday species and, despite their bold [...]
We’ve just launched a new online course about birds and behavior. Titled “Courtship and Rivalry in Birds,” it’s appropriate for all levels of interest and birdwatching expertise—anyone who’s ever seen a bird have an odd hop, wing-stretch, or squabble and wondered what it meant. The five-week course is taught on a rotating basis, and enrollment [...]
Jon Erickson is living on the island of Mauritius for the next nine months. While his wife pursues a Fulbright scholarship to study local children’s literature, Jon plans to explore the island, recorder and parabolic microphone in hand, gathering natural sounds for our ever-expanding archives in the Macaulay Library. Mauritius, a former French colony, is [...]
Last weekend our ace programmer, France Dewaghe, skipped out of Ithaca for Cape May to catch the tail-end of fall migration. Here at work, we had been thinking a lot about bird identification and the power of groups to hone in on IDs, even tricky ones. So when France came back with a memory card [...]
A new line of greeting cards lets you send an elegant piece of bird art and bring it to life with accurate sounds of the species on the front. The cards are a collaboration between an English company, Really Wild Cards, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Each card features a lovely bird painting taken from [...]
Birdsong fascinates scientists because it’s varied, beautiful, complicated—and because many birds learn songs in a way similar to how humans learn language. Studying the way young birds acquire their songs might allow us to solve problems with the way children develop language.
Much song research is done by watching young birds in captivity, but research just [...]
What do you get when you cross a welder’s mask with a hummingbird feeder? About the closest view of a hummingbird possible without actually climbing inside a flower. At least that’s how it looks from this video demonstration (YouTube).
Sure, with a bit of persistence and a porch full of feeders you can make hummers [...]
The cover story in Living Bird Summer 2009—now free online—offers up a tempting prospect for listers: Your trip in search of Mexico’s endemic Tufted Jay just might hold the key to the species’ survival. Or read Stephen J. Bodio’s article about how pigeons influenced Darwin’s thinking on evolution, and never look at pigeons the [...]
You know what’s super-cool? Putting a lipstick-sized camera on the back of a Black-browed Albatross and turning it loose to forage across the windswept Southern Ocean. That’s what scientists from the National Institute of Polar Research in Japan and the British Antarctic Survey have done with four of the birds, and they’ve wound up with [...]
A blog from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
|
