“I like the challenge of trying to figure out how to go birding when there’s a traffic jam on first avenue. It’s cool to be able to study birds in a city… Some people have seen technology as the end of all things natural, but there’s a whole other side to it that gives us access to a world that we would otherwise not have seen.”

Andrew Farnsworth is working with new technology to advance the intensive acoustic analysis required to identify the night calls of migratory birds. With colleagues at Cornell, he is embarking on an ambitious project called BirdCast that will synthesize night flight calls, eBird data visualizations, and the clouds of migrating birds detected at night by weather radar stations. For the first time ever, real-time predictions of bird migrations will provide a window into the world of migration at a scale previously unimaginable. Farnsworth is hopeful, as this new vision of migratory behavior could ultimately be used to prevent the deaths of millions of birds.

Andrew Farnsworth is currently a Research Associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where he works with new technology to advance the intensive acoustic analysis required to identify the night calls of migratory birds. He also is on the board of the New York City Audubon.

Connect with Andrew Farnsworth

BirdCast

E-bird