Cornell Lab of Ornithology

So lumber companies, power companies, developers, landowners, large corporations, etc., routinely try to discredit even valid reports of endangered birds.

In 2004, Tim Gallagher of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a well-known, respected, and knowledgeable birder, and his friend Bobby Harrison documented a sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas.

The lab put together a search to get photos, sound recordings, video, and any other physical evidence that the bird still existed.

The last confirmed sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker took place seven decades before that in the Singer Tract in northeastern Louisiana in 1935, when Cornell scientists got photographs and recordings from 1937 to 1941, when researcher James Tanner conducted a comprehensive study of the species, 1943, when Audubon's Richard Poe found a single female during a six-week search, and 1944, when artist Don Eccleberry, on Poe's advice, spent two weeks observing and sketching a female, the last universally accepted sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker ever in the United States.

I was thrilled to hear Cornell's big announcement of Gallagher and Harrison sighting and eager to go to Arkansas to help with the search.

I'd have joined the lab team in a heartbeat.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has long been my personal mecca.

But Cornell University, not the lab itself, insisted on full ownership of all photos and recordings taken by everyone on the team, and no one on the team would be allowed to share publicly any information about the search that hadn't been vetted by university officials.

I'm Vanessa Barchfield.

In this episode, my co-host Mike Stark talks with Mike Webster, Emeritus Director of the Macaulay Library at the famed Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

It's the world's largest and oldest archive of wildlife recordings, including the sounds of more than 10,000 bird species.

Listen closely and you'll hear the call of several extinct species and a few that are now on the road to recovery.

There are just so many interesting calls, the voices and the ways that birds talk to each other are so varied.

But I guess if I was going to pick one, I would pick this recording of the Montezuma Oropendola.

That was recorded actually in the middle of the last century, about 1955, by Arthur Allen, who was actually the founder of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the founder of the Macaulay Library, which back then was called the Library of Natural Sounds.

And part of his mission was to travel the globe and record the voices of birds and also movies of birds and try and document what they did and how they talked to each other.

Audubon is a great site, too.

All About Birds, which is part of the Cornell Ornithology program.

A lot of great information about birds.

If you search any bird, eastern bluebird, for example, it can tell you where they live at different times of the year, where they migrate to, what they eat, what kind of habitat needs they have.

Simple ways to live a bird-friendly life in and out of the garden.

And this is advice from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which the Cornell Lab of Ornithology knows everything about

birds.

Yes.