Integrating all these assets with those of BNA, Neotropical Birds, eBird, and Macaulay Library has allowed us to produce an extraordinary new web portal under the capable leadership of former eBird project leader Brian Sullivan. The last of 17 volumes appeared in 2014, followed by an extra volume summarizing the world’s 243 bird families, copublished with the Cornell Lab.Īnd now, the exciting marriage announcement: the Cornell Lab has acquired from Lynx Edicions the exclusive digital rights to all the content of Handbook of the Birds of the World. By strength of graceful but unrelenting persuasiveness, Josep patiently harnessed the time and expertise of hundreds of ornithologists, myself included, to produce an epic scientific milestone. I was among the many ornithologists to doubt the feasibility of such a massive undertaking, but I was wrong. The project seemed too ambitious to complete, doomed to collapse of its own weight.
With the 1992 appearance of Handbook of the Birds of the World, Volume 1: Ostrich to Ducks, a visionary country doctor named Josep del Hoyo, and his Catalonia-based Lynx Edicions, declared an outrageous goal: an exhaustive, illustrated compendium of the taxonomy, distribution, and biology of all 10,500+ bird species, compiled by the world’s top bird authorities. The online BNA now reaches thousands of subscribers worldwide, and its tropical sister, Neotropical Birds, is available to everyone for free.
Over the years accounts have been revised and linked to media from the Macaulay Library and eBird, and new editing tools have facilitated ongoing revisions. The Cornell Lab joined the BNA consortium in 1998 and later assumed its management under the leadership of its longtime editor, Alan Poole. The historic 1992 launch of BNA as a hard-copy production yielded scholarly biographies compiled by hundreds of experts and painstakingly edited by a small, Philadelphia-based staff. Today we are thrilled to announce the launch, in early 2020, of another major ornithological milestone, Birds of the World, a marriage of previously discrete resources into one comprehensive and colorful hub. Many of our projects over the past 25 years reflect these objectives, including our involvement with Birds of North America, management of its online version, creation of eBird as a global enterprise, development of Bird Academy, and digitization of Macaulay Library archives to permit public browsing. A note on the release and history of Birds of the World by John Fitzpatrick, Director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.Īmong my earliest commitments when I became director of the Cornell Lab in 1994 was to expand the services both to scholarly ornithology and to the vital bridges connecting the scholarly and popular sides of our discipline.
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