Recent Updates

  • October 11, 2019The Journey Has Just Begun

    In Fall 2018, the Batting Birds community sprinted through the first round of data collection. The researchers then set to work on turning the data into visualizations for us to explore. We worked with programmers and tested several versions of…

  • This is a screenshot of an interactive visualization. There are photographs of birds connected by gray arrows with a box to the right instructing user to hover over and interact with the photos. There are 13 photos.
    April 15, 2021The Interactions Behind The Rankings

    This past winter, a community of more than 1,000 people watched and recorded data in video clips taken from the Panama Fruit Feeder cam. They recorded two key pieces of information: (1) whenever one bird attempted to take the perch…

  • March 19, 2020The Final Results Are In!

    Since May 2018, more than 1,400 members of the Hawk Talk project put on their citizen-science caps and joined other viewers and scientists on a mission to reveal new insights from the Red-tailed Hawk cam. The community watched the cam,…

  • April 14, 2020The Data Tools

    When we watch the cams, we can come up with all kinds of questions once our curiosity is piqued. Taking note of interesting patterns is how scientific investigations start. Once we have questions in hand, the next step is to…

  • A screenshot of the data collection screen for the Battling Birds data collection on Zooniverse.
    December 7, 2020The Data Tool: Zooniverse

    To figure out what’s going on between the birds on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Panama Fruit Feeder cam, we will be using Zooniverse’s video tagging tool to collect data from recorded video footage. Zooniverse is a free, easy-to-use online…

  • A screenshot of the data collection tool used, showing the cam and the buttons
    February 12, 2021The Data Tool: Live Tagging

    For the Cornell Feeders Live investigation, we’ll be using a recently developed live data tagging tool. We first used this tool for Panama Live. In that investigation we documented the arrival patterns of six species on the Panama Fruit Feeder…

  • A person sits on a stool at a desk and is typing on a keyboard and facing a monitor. To the right of the person is a bar chart with an arrow points up as it increases. There are two images of birds: male and female Red-winged Blackbird.
    October 21, 2021The Bird Cams Lab Experience: What We Learned From External Evaluation

    During 2018–21, people from around the world teamed up with one another and scientists to learn more about birds on the Cornell Lab’s Bird Cams.

    Figure 1. The locations of Bird Cams Lab participants for the last four investigations: Cornell Feeders…

  • A red-tailed hawk fledgling looking at the cam and perched on the railing seen on the Red-tailed Hawk cam.
    July 8, 2021Thank you, Bird Cams Lab Community!

    Back in 2018, Bird Cams Lab started as a research project funded by the National Science Foundation. We set out to engage cam viewers from around the world in co-creating scientific investigations together in an online space, and to understand…

  • On the lefthand side is a videofeed in which there is a small bright blue-green bird perched on a feeding table in front of green vegetation. On the right is buttons and a question to illustrate the data collection protocol.
    January 21, 2021Test Run Data Collection for Battling Birds: Panama Edition!

    Thanks to the community discussions and feedback, we’ve finished designing a protocol for data collection. This protocol will allow participants to record the essential information that we’ll need to investigate the social rankings of birds at the feeder and evaluate…

  • February 5, 2019Tag Data on our new Zooniverse Project “Hawk Talk”
  • A gray-headed chachalaca (gray-brown medium-sized bird) is standing on a feeding table that has a couple green and yellow oranges. The backdrop is lots of green vegetation, as in big tropical leaves. In the top right corner is a nectar feeder (red with yellow flowers). There is a yellow crown overlayed on the bird's head.
    April 7, 2021Tag Data And Register For Upcoming Webinar

    As of yesterday, the Bird Cams Lab community has grown to over 7,900 people. Welcome newcomers! We are thrilled to have you join our community of co-creators.

    Right now there are two investigations underway with two different cams, (1) Battling Birds…

  • a screenshot of what the data collection tool looks like
    May 21, 2020Start Collecting Data for the Hawk Investigation!

    It’s time—we’re ready to start collecting data for Hawk Happenings, a new name for the current investigation using the Cornell Hawks cam. The name was inspired by the community-generated question we aim to answer:

    “What is the frequency of certain hawk…