Latest Posts
Birds, Feeders, and Science Oh My! What Can We Discover Together?
Tune in to learn more about the birds on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's FeederWatch cam and Cornell Feeders Live, Bird Cams Lab's newest scientific investigation that is already underway! Right now, the Bird Cams Lab community is in the midst of deciding what question to investigate with the Cornell FeederWatch cam in an online...
February 22, 2021
Birds Don’t Check The Temperature Before Visiting The Feeder
For the Cornell Feeders Live investigation, we have shared visualizations that highlight (1) the sampling effort (i.e., amount of time watched) and (2) when the study species visited the feeding station. This second set of visualizations helped us start to answer our first research question: What is the daily visitation pattern of different species at...
June 22, 2021
Bigger The Bird, Bigger The Punch
On the Cornell Lab’s Panama Fruit Feeder cam, there are dozens of charismatic bird species who visit a feeding table filled with fruit and rice. Staff at the Canopy Lodge, where the feeding table is located, have to restock it every couple hours because many times the birds eat through everything. When these species come to...
April 12, 2021
Battling Birds: Panama Findings Are In!
When it comes to foraging at a feeder in Panama, the bigger the bird, the higher it is in the social pecking order The Bird Cams Lab community joined forces with Cornell Lab of Ornithology researcher Dr. Eliot Miller to better understand the social relationships between birds visiting a feeder in Panama seen on the Cornell...
June 23, 2021
Battling Birds: Panama Edition Launches
Join the Bird Cams Lab community in the newest investigation, Battling Birds: Panama Edition. Just like the first Battling Birds investigation, we want to learn more about what birds are doing at a feeder. However, this time we'll virtually be in Panama, watching the Panama Fruit Feeder cam! As we designed Panama Live, the last investigation...
December 8, 2020Battling Birds: Panama Edition Final Report
Summary Inspired by community interest in previous Bird Cams Lab investigations about aggressive interactions between birds at feeders, we collaborated with Dr. Eliot Miller to learn more about the social relationships among the birds seen on the Panama Fruit Feeder cam. The Bird Cams Lab community worked with Dr. Miller and other Cornell Lab of...
June 23, 2021
Battling Birds: From Zooniverse to Here
What actually goes on at your backyard bird feeder? Do the birds get along or do they fight? If you take a moment to watch your feeder, you might notice that it isn’t just peace and harmony, but some birds will be aggressive towards one another. In this social world, the larger birds are typically...
August 24, 2019
Battling Birds: About the Feeder
Battling Birds is a project on Zooniverse, an easy-to-use platform that hosts hundreds of other citizen-science projects from arts to astronomy to wildlife. There, over 2,000 citizen scientists collected data from over 10,000 clips! These clips were taken from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's FeederWatch cam, located in the Treman Bird Feeding Garden at the Cornell...
June 19, 2019Battling Birds Data Collection Is Complete!
In under a month, over 2,000 contributors classified over 10,000 clips! That's more than 75,000 classifications! We did not expect the community to be so passionate about the project. Thank you to everyone that has become a part of the Battling Birds community, both by classifying and by participating in the Talk forums. With this first...
February 5, 2019
An Exciting Question, and a Look Ahead
After weeks of brainstorming, sorting, and discussing questions, we now have a winning question to investigate, based on more than 100 votes cast. Out of the seven proposed questions, the runaway winner was “Do the hawks use different kinds of calls in different situations at the nest?” We also saw strong interest in other questions as well....
July 13, 2018