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Mission Accomplished: students and staff return with new recordings of Australian birds
By Eliot Miller
Dawn found us in the midst of a deafening chorus of birdsong in the Australian bush. As we discussed our plan for the morning, hordes of hungry honeyeaters were already at work fighting for the sweet nectar of nearby flowers. As we set off on our separate ways through the red earth, low shrubs, and…
Read more Mission Accomplished: students and staff return with new recordings of Australian birds

Recordist of Note: Wil Hershberger
By Kathi Borgmann
In 1995 Wil Hershberger, a molecular biologist by training and an avid birder, found himself in northern California. That’s where Hershberger was bitten, by the recording bug that is. Hershberger says he was always into birds. First, it was a brilliant Baltimore Oriole in his backyard that made him take notice of birds when he…
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Shining Bronze-Cuckoo

The joys of recording bird sounds
By Kathi Borgmann
We recently asked our followers why they record bird sounds. We received many heartfelt responses from recordists around the world. We could not have said it better ourselves! Here are Martina Nordstrand, Guillermo Funes, Wesley Rajaleelan, Erik Dale Ostrander, Ben Mirin, Mario Reyes,  Samim Akhter, Julia Plummer, Mike Hearell, and Laura Giannone in their own words…
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Cerulean Warbler

Female bird song
By Kathi Borgmann
More and more scientists are turning their attention to female birds, uncovering new behaviors and changing the way we think about evolution (see the recent Living Bird article). Karan Odom, a Cornell Lab of Ornithology postdoctoral researcher, and her team used assets in the Macaulay Library and discovered that female bird song is present in…
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Black Falcon

Photos in the archive help build new Australian Birds of Prey book
By Mat Gilfedder
Thousands of birders and photographers archive their media every year in the Macaulay Library. Some of these photos are now featured in a new field guide on Australian birds of prey. Mat Gilfedder and his coauthors searched the Macaulay Library for photos of Australian raptors in flight and reached out to each photographer for permission…
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Carolina Wren

Ninety for ninety years—a celebration for our 90th anniversary
By Macaulay Library Team
The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is celebrating 90 years of archiving and recording bird sounds. On May 18th, 1929 Arthur Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg made history with the very first recording of wild birds in North America. Since that pivotal day in Ithaca, New York in 1929, the Macaulay Library…
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