Cornell's Enormous New Mural Depicts Every Living Bird Family

Artist Jane Kim spent 16 months drawing 270 birds in exquisite, larger-than-life detail.

    

By Tom Zoellner

December 11, 2015

If there was ever a Sistine Chapel for worshipping birds, it would be the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Based in Ithaca, New York, the sleek wood-and-steel structure houses labs for 250 professors and students, sound recordings of more than 165,000 birds and beasts, and a glass observatory where visitors can peek through scopes into the Sapsucker Woods to spot real-life birds.

Now, this avian Vatican also has its own Michelangelo: This week San Francisco artist Jane Kim put the finishing touches on her 40-foot-tall, 70-foot-wide mural of every living family of bird in the world.The 34-year-old illustrator, who runs a studio called Ink Dwell with her business partner Thayer Walker, spent 16 months on the project—weekends included. “I haven’t really had a life since this began,” Kim says. “This was more passion-driven than practicality-driven.”

With only the aid of a scissor-lift and the occasional assistant, Kim hand-painted 270 birds onto shadows of all the continents—the birds' locations are set near their evolutionary birth places. The Saddle-billed Stork, for instance, has one foot planted firmly in southwest Africa, while the Great Spotted Kiwi squats down in New Zealand. 

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Recognition Tool Identifies Bird Species

The Merlin Bird Photo ID is currently able to identify 400 different bird species.
Cari Jorgensen


The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, along with Cornell Tech and Caltech, has developed a system that can recognize and identify bird species. The Merlin Bird Photo ID can currently identify 400 species, based on imagery examination, Wired reports.

Birds are traditionally hard for recognition tools to identify.

"Asking computers to identify bird species is a challenge not only because some species look so alike, but also because their shape varies from moment to moment. On top of that, photographs of birds often include complex backgrounds, and the birds may be far away or blurry," the Cornell Lab told Wired.

The team at Cornell and Caltech were determined to develop the tool, however, and did so by building a "visual recognition engine for birds,” Wired reports. This involved collecting a large amount of data and creating a complex algorithm that uses that data to identify various patterns, which in turn help the Merlin Bird Photo ID better identify each species. Part of the data included myriad photos of birds, accurately tagged, which Cornell received in droves.


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Global Big Day logs more than half the world's bird species in one day

Posted on: 15 May 2015

The Global Big Day event organised by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology recorded 5,950 species worldwide.

Thanks to the worldwide birding community, 9 May was an historic day – the first Global Big Day for bird conservation. More than 13,000 birders in 127 countries joined the Cornell Big Day team by entering their sightings into eBird, and achieved a worldwide total of more than 5,950 species on a single day – more than half of the world’s bird species!

More than 800,000 bird observations were uploaded to eBird on the day. The numbers are still rising, and you can explore the live results here http://ebird.org/ebird/globalbigday/. If you went birding on 9 May and haven’t entered sightings yet, it’s not too late – head on over to eBird.org, and perhaps the total can eventually reach 6,000 species?

Across Britain, 60 birders have submitted 146 checklists so far, logging 182 species of birds. In England, Lincolnshire reported more species than any other county with 108. Norfolk was the runner-up with 100, and sightings were entered from 25 additional counties. Scotland topped Wales by a significant margin, with 103 species versus Wales’s 44.

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Bird Conservation: A History

In today's technology-driven world, it can be very easy to focus on technological advances and ignore the effects on the Earth and the millions of species living on it. There are of course, many initiatives to draw attention and assistance to conservation efforts. The conservation world is smaller than one may think though, with many initiatives being spear-headed by the same people. Bird conservation is no different, and indeed, is not easily separated from general conservation efforts, nor should it be.

The most well-known bird conservation organization is the Audubon Society. This national society has numerous local chapters, and works to help various conservation causes. What is most impressive about the Audubon society is the success of their grassroots recruiting methods. This method is at the heart of Audbon's origins, long before the society was even imagined.

Read more: http://www.earthtimes.org/green-blogs/green-living/bird-conservation-a-history-14-Sep-12/