With over 175,000 audio and 60,000 video recordings of birds and other animals, The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology is one of the world's largest collections of media documenting biodiversity. The Scout Report has visited both
the Library and
the Lab previously, but, since 2015 is their Centennial, we thought the site was worth a return trip. Not only that, the technology to listen to media has improved tremendously over the years; the 2004 Report notes, "Site visitors with broadband internet connections can link to video clips of bird behavior from the Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library." With today's computing power, the main requirement is the scientific name of a species, which will retrieve audio, video, and maps related to the animal. There's a feed from the Macaulay Library Facebook page, where an audio quiz is posted every few days, inviting visitors to identify bird sounds. The Library is currently partnering with NPR, on the
Decoding Nature project. Listeners can record a clip of a bird or other animal sound in their backyard, send it to NPR, and the Lab will identify the source.
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