Round Robin

The Library of Congress today added 25 historic recordings to the National Recording Registry. They were mostly songs, ranging from jazz to country to blues to opera, although poets, politicians, and comedians also made appearances. The only nonhuman voice to make the select group was the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. You can listen to its nasal kent calls arriving from 74 years in the past on this montage of the recordings.

The National Recording Registry was established in 2000 and now contains 275 entries. Its purpose is to preserve the best available recordings of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” material. You can nominate your favorite historic sounds for next year’s installment at this Library of Congress website.

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker was recorded (and filmed) in Louisiana in 1935 by Cornell Lab of Ornithology founder Arthur Allen and colleague Peter Paul Kellogg. It appears alongside Leonard Bernstein’s score from West Side Story and John Lee Hooker’s blues recording of “Boogie Chillen.” For more about the recording, see our Ivory-billed Woodpecker website.

Other notable inductions? Marian Anderson’s recital on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Dylan Thomas reading “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” Link Wray’s growling guitar “Rumble,” and Mel Brooks cracking up an audience as a 2000-year-old man. (Full list here.)

But you’ll hear only one of these famous artists actually beating its head on a tree—and if you ask me, that’s the one that sticks in the mind.

(Image: James Tanner recording in the Singer Tract, Louisiana, 1935. Arthur Allen Collection, Cornell Lab of Ornithology)

The 26th Annual World Series of Birding happened on Saturday, May 9th, with outstanding results. Overall, birders tallied 269 species in a single 22-hour period from midnight Friday to 10 p.m. Saturday. The Lagerhead Shrikes of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club had the highest team score, with 229 species. In second place, with 223 species was the Foundation for Avian Research & Education.

Our own Team Sapsucker placed third with 221 species, the highest total of any out-of-state team. It was an amazing result for a team whose van blew a tire at 2:30 a.m., putting them 90 minutes behind schedule after a rescue by friends of the team Ken Rosenberg and Dennis Miranda.

Their luck didn’t stop there, and by 10:50 a.m., the team was on their fourth vehicle of the day—minus their sandwiches, extra clothing, and spotting scope, which had to be left behind in another car so the whole team could squeeze into the first sedan. Check the team’s Twitter posts for more details of the frantic day.

Among other results:

• The Cornell student team (the Redheads) took the award for most birds in Cape May County with 187 species
• France Dewaghe (our All About Birds programmer) and his father, Gerry Dewaghe, won the Swarovski Digi Camera Award for most species photographed (125 species, including the Prairie Warbler above).
• The Carbon Footprint Award went to team Ridin’ Birdy, who checked off 132 species without the use of a motorized vehicle
• Birding has a very bright future. Student teams in grades 9-12, 6-8, and 1-5 scored an amazing 215, 158, and 117 species respectively

So far, Team Sapsucker and The Redheads have raised $196,453 in pledges and donations, thanks to the uncommon generosity of supporters of Cornell Lab of Ornithology and eBirders! If donations continue to come in, the teams could break their $200,000 record! (You can help here.) Every cent goes to support conservation and student research programs here at the Lab, thanks to our sponsor, Swarovski Optik, which covers all the teams’ expenses.

Thanks very much to everyone who supported the teams by helping in the fundraising efforts or making personal donations. Congratulations to Team Sapsucker, the Redheads, team Dewaghe—and of course to the Lagerheads—and all the other World Series competitors!

For complete Big Day results, visit the Cape May Bird Observatory World Series of Birding website at
http://www.birdcapemay.org/wsob.shtml.
See this Associated Press article about the Big Day, with photos of Team Sapsucker in action:
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/05/269_species_seen_in_state_worl.html

Image: A Prairie Warbler photographed by France Dewaghe during the World Series. France attributes the great composition of the Prairie Warbler shot to serendipity. Most photos taken the day of the event, he says, look more like this:

Do you know what species it is?

It’s the start of May, perhaps bird watching’s biggest month, when pretty much the entire Northern Hemisphere brims once again with summer’s full array of birds.

It’s a great time to go bird watching, and we’re inviting you to come out with us – in our new, free series of Web videos, Inside Birding. Your hosts are Chris Wood and Jessie Barry, two expert birders who work at the Lab, guide birding tours in their spare time, and compete for the Lab in the World Series of Birding (which, by the way, happens this weekend).

Jessie and Chris are incredibly sharp birders, and in the first four episodes of Inside Birding they share some of their secrets about how they identify birds so confidently and so quickly. Each roughly 10-minute video takes an in-depth look at one of their four basic keys: Size & Shape, Color Pattern, Behavior, and Habitat. (Visit the Building Skills section of All About Birds for more practice at using these four keys.)

Bird ID is just the beginning for Inside Birding. Future episodes will cover everything from practical details for beginners to where and when to take a great birding expedition. Jessie and Chris are fun, knowledgeable, and they’re able to explain complex skills in clear language that’s easy to grasp. Combined with breathtaking cinematography and gorgeous clips from our Macaulay Library archives, you’ll soon find Chris and Jessie’s advice is easy to adopt – and fun to put into practice.

Today we launched a new version of our All About Birds website. We’ve put a huge amount of work into updating the site, expanding information, adding sound and video from our Macaulay Library archives, inventing new tools, and incorporating photos and ID tips. The new site is bigger and more informative. To help you get the most out of it, here’s a tour through some of the new features:

Revised species accounts: 8 tips

1. Greatly expanded material for 51 common species. 585 species covered in total. Which 51 did we expand? Here’s a list.

2. Four keys to ID. We’re trying to make it easier for you to identify birds. So on each revised page we give you a quick run-down of four keys that will help you close in on an identification – before you get to the point of opening a field guide. For more information about these four keys – Size & Shape, Color Pattern, Behavior, Habitat – see our Building Skills section.

3. Lots of photos. Birds look different from place to place and pose to pose. We collected photos into an all-new photo viewer and added annotations to help you see the important field marks. Scroll through the photos, or click on them to see a larger version. Try the Pop-Out button to save a photo in a separate window while you scroll. (We are grateful to all the great photographers at Birdshare as well as Project FeederWatch and Great Backyard Bird Count participants for making this tool possible.)

4. Similar species. Right next to the species photo viewer you’ll find a selection of similar species photographs. We’ve chosen these to illustrate some possible ID confusions, and annotated them to point out ways to tell the two species apart. Scroll through this tool, zoom, and pop out the photos the same way you use the main photo tool. Note: the similar species are presented in alphabetic order.

5. Tabs keep you organized. There’s a lot of information on the revised species accounts, so we’ve broken up each page into four tabs: Identification help, Life History information, Sounds, and Videos.

6. Check out the icons. One way we organized information was by making icons to represent general categories each bird fits into. Under the Life History tab, you can quickly see a bird’s typical habitat, main food, preferred nesting location, foraging style, and conservation status. Click on those icons and you’ll go down the page to an in-depth treatment of each topic summarized from the authoritative Birds of North America series. (A tip of our hat to the authors of The Birder’s Handbook for coming up with the icons idea more than 20 years ago.)

7. Your link to up-to-the-minute data. Right under each account’s standard range map you’ll find a link to an eBird map that shows all species reported to the program over the last five years. It’s a great way to check on up-to-date sightings (for example, the eBird map reveals how House Finches have moved into new areas since the standard range maps were drawn). You can customize these maps further to focus on any date range and any part of North America you’re interested in.

8. Species-specific links to more information. At the bottom of each page, we’ve gathered information for anyone who wants to know more about each species. We give suggestions about ways to go out and find each species. We’ve got ideas about how to get a particular species to visit your yard. And we point you toward further reading as well as citizen science projects you can join to help study the species.

Better search and navigation

It’s a lot easier to find your bird now. Every page has a search box at the top right corner. In addition:

• If you think you know a bird’s name, use the search box. Even if you don’t get the name exactly right – or you only know its “last” name (such as “cardinal,” “crow,” or “waxwing”), choices will pop up below the box as you type.
• If you don’t know a bird’s name, start by browsing groups of similar shaped birds. We’ll show you names of birds that match that general shape.
• It’s a lot easier to get around between species now. If you’re trying to work out an ID, we’ll list similar species for you. Just click on a similar species name to go to its page. And don’t miss the Jump to recent list (just above the range map on every species profile). It lets you move quickly back through the last 10 species you’ve visited.

Visit Building Skills to brush up on your bird identification.

Learn – or practice – the basic skills of identification. We’ve got lots of illustrated examples, from discerning differences in bill shape to tricks for gauging size in the field. You’ll even find videos to show you the characteristic ways birds move around, as well as sounds to help you tune in to bird songs.

Don’t miss the multimedia features.

We’ve got a great video production team at the Lab. Watch our recent productions in a beautiful large format on our multimedia page. Now playing: battling grouse, hungry crossbills, and resurgent puffins, and more. Check back in two weeks for the launch of our Inside Birding series.

Catch up on your reading.

The Lab’s award-winning quarterly magazine, Living Bird, features great writing about science, travel, art, and history – all illustrated with gorgeous bird photography. If you haven’t read us recently, you can catch up on 2008 and 2009 articles online.

That’s it! Head on over and look around.

And don’t worry if you miss something: there’s lots to see, but in coming weeks we’ll write posts to remind you about some of the new features.

One thing we ask: Please be sure to tell us what you think of the new site. Are you having any problems using it? We’ll do our best to help. Would you like to see more features? We’ll put them on our to-do list. Do you have a favorite species and want to see an expanded account for it? Vote for it here.

Leave us a comment, or drop a line via the site contact form. Thanks!