If you love birds and are suffering from a bit of cabin fever, you can get on-line and study up on songbirds so you’ll be ready come spring.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology website is one good way to keep up with birding over the winter.
Welcome to this week’s edition of Something Wild. I’m Rosemary Conroy for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
If you love birds and are, perhaps, suffering from a bit of cabin fever, you may want to fire up your computer. If you can’t get outside, you can get on-line and study up on songbirds so you’ll be ready come spring.
It’s really amazing what the marriage of science and technology can offer those of us longing for some sound or sights of a season other than winter! The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in particular, has a bevy of bandwidth devoted to images, video, acoustics, and interesting news about our feathered friends.
Just go to birds.cornell.edu and you can read recent research into why evening grosbeaks have disappeared from our bird feeders, test your identification skills with a video quiz, and compare your recent sightings with others from across New Hampshire and around the country.
Their new Macaulay Library, for example, has more than 65,000 sound clips and 18,000 videos of birds and animals that you can access anytime. And it is all free.
Another feature that I really enjoy is their nestbox cams. You can watch barn owls in California to wood ducks in Texas to bluebirds in Kentucky. While of course nesting season is now over, you can get highlights from the previous two seasons.
If you want something more interactive, sign up for a “citizen science project.†They range from enumerating the nuthatches at your feeders to conducting classroom research projects for kids. Or log onto E-bird, where you can post your bird sightings and find out what others in your area have seen as well.
Of course, there are some drawbacks to all these website wonders. Enthralling as it may be, don’t forget to log-off from time to time and go outside! You know, into the real world.
Something Wild is a joint production of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, New Hampshire Audubon, and New Hampshire Public Radio.
For Something Wild, I’m Rosemary Conroy.
