Attending the Cornell Young Birders Event
Written by Song Han Ngo
As a high schooler with a passion for birdwatching, attending the Cornell Young Birders Event was an amazing experience that I’ll never forget. The event, which occurs annually, brings together 16 young birders from across the world to spend the weekend learning about career options in ornithology and birding in Ithaca, New York.
Sapsucker Woods and the Cornell Lab.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is located within the Sapsucker woods, a natural area that contains a variety of habitats ranging from open ponds to evergreen forests. Additionally, the nearby Montezuma National Wildlife refuge offered extensive marshlands and open water, further providing opportunities to see a diverse range of birds. This made each birding trip a unique and exciting excursion, with the young birders spotting 131 species over the event, including some delights such as the Least Bittern and Virginia Rail!
Aside from the birding, the event also focused on meeting and learning from the experiences of the different staff members at the Cornell lab. On the opening night of the event, we were introduced to the unique idea of “Birds and”, which means that birders should seek to bring other non-ornithology related skills and tie it together with the birding world in order to make an impact. Over the next few days, we had the opportunity to meet a variety of people working at the lab, from the developers behind Merlin to field researchers studying penguins in the Southern hemisphere. Whether it be spreading awareness through the community, coding an innovative identification algorithm, or lobbying for the passage of new laws, we were stressed the importance of interdisciplinary skills and encouraged to find out what we want our own “Birds and” to be.
Sound recording at Shindagin Hollow.
Finally, we were able to experience hands-on learning through different labs guided by Cornell staff. On Saturday morning, we were able to make contributions to the Macaulay library’s audio collection, recording the vibrant songs of little birds such as thrushes and wrens in the nearby Shindagin Hollow. Later that evening, we were taught the processes for editing and annotating the recordings to make them useful for training Merlin’s sound ID feature. We were also given tours of many of the Cornell lab’s facilities, my favorite being the night at the museum, where we were allowed to view and even touch many of the taxidermied specimens of birds that Cornell keeps. The museum has over 50,000 specimens collected since the early 1900s, even including some extinct species such as the Ivory Billed Woodpecker and Passenger pigeon!
Taxidermy being prepared at the museum tour.
Overall, the Cornell Young Birders Event was an incredible opportunity that deepened my passion for birds. It was incredibly inspiring to meet not only the talented and driven Cornell staff but also the other young birders, who shared my enthusiasm for ornithology. Before the event, I had never realized that there were so many other teenagers out there just like me who loved birds just as much as me, and I’m looking forward to keeping in touch and staying friends with them through the years. On top of that, I left the event with a new outlook on what it means to have a career in ornithology. As someone with a strong quantitative background especially in coding and math, I never realized that these skills are relevant and useful to the birding world. I hope that in the future, I’ll be able to help conserve birds using them. I am grateful for what the event has taught me, and look forward to pursuing ornithology in the future.