Ornithology lab provides bird recordings for 'The Big Year'

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library -- the world's largest archive of animal sound recordings and associated animal behavior video footage -- gave a new Hollywood movie about birders an air of authenticity by providing audio recordings of common and rare bird species and video footage of rare birds.

The 20th Century Fox comedy "The Big Year," starring Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson, opens nationwide Oct. 14.

The Big Year refers to a competition to view the most species of birds in a year within the continental United States, Alaska, Canada and a few islands. The movie is loosely based on a 2004 nonfiction book of the same title by Mark Obmascik that chronicles a 1998 Big Year contest among three birders, Sandy Komito, Al Levantin and Greg Miller. The contest ended with Komito breaking his own record with a total of 745 species.

The library provided the movie's producers with 18 audio recordings of 17 species, including such common species as northern waterthrush and laughing gull, and such rarities as the south polar skua and the red-legged kittiwake, an Arctic breeding gull. They also provided a number of video recordings including a Nutting's flycatcher, a rare sight in the United States, and an American avocet in flight, which the producers specifically requested.

"The key to a successful Big Year is seeing the rarities as well as the common species," said Greg Budney, curator of the Macaulay Library. "[The movie's producers] needed sounds of species that only occasionally or rarely appear in North America."

In light of the Big Year contest, "it's fairly straightforward to see the birds that nest in North America, but the successful Big Year birders fly off at a moment's notice to Texas or Arizona to track the latest birds that have been reported there," said Marshall Iliff, project leader for eBird, a citizen science project that allows a massive network of volunteers to submit records of bird sightings to a Cornell database. eBird provides birders the tools they need to track their lists of sightings --including their Big Year lists -- while at the same time making those data available for science and conservation.

The Internet, social media and citizen science projects like eBird have greatly advanced the speed of communication regarding bird sightings, aiding Big Year contestants to receive up-to-date information, Iliff added.

"The movie can only be a good thing for birding," said Iliff. "The fact that there are people who care about birds and engage in these crazy pursuits in a fun, competitive way" may lead others to also care about protecting birds and to get involved in citizen science, he added.

Sandy Komito, as well as previous North American Big Year record holders Kenn Kaufman and Ted Parker have had connections with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Komito took the Macaulay Library's sound recording workshop in Calpine, Calif., in 1994. Parker, who died in 1993, was a world-renowned field ornithologist from Louisiana State University who contributed more than 10,000 sound recordings to the Macaulay Library. And author Kaufman and his wife, Kim, gave a Monday Night Seminar presentation in September on concentrations of warblers in Ohio, and Kenn collaborated with the Cornell lab on the BirdsEye app, which uses eBird data to help people find birds. It features sounds from the Macaulay Library and bird-finding tips by Kaufman.

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Blaine Friedlander