For students with birds on the brain, the Birding Club at Cornell offers a haven for exploration, curiosity and community.
With 252 registered club members, the Birding Club at Cornell fosters community by connecting student birders. The club takes members on trips around Central New York to view and photograph birds in an effort to make birding accessible to all interested students.
The Birding Club is currently preparing to compete in the New Jersey Audubon’s 2025 World Series of Birding, which will be held on Saturday. The World Series of Birding hosts teams competing to identify and tally as many different species of birds as possible in 24 hours. The event is sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the competition is based out of New Jersey.
The Birding Club Community
“My favorite part about coming to Cornell and joining the Birding Club is that you’re surrounded by so many other people who also enjoy [birding],” said Allison Cao ’26, the vice president of the Birding Club.
The Birding Club hosts both day and overnight trips open to students at any level of birding ability. Each trip usually targets a specific bird, where they time their trips to see a certain bird. They aim to get students to appreciate nature and identify various birds in the area.
Annie Chen ’28 joined the Birding Club during her first semester at Cornell. She has taken multiple trips with the club, including a beginner’s trip around Beebe Lake, a trip to see a Snowy Owl at the Finger Lakes Regional Airport and another to see an American Woodcock around the Ithaca Tompkins International Airport.
When asked what her favorite part of the Birding Club was, Chen said befriending fellow bird enthusiasts and learning more about different kinds of birds, even interrupting herself during the interview to identify a Red-tailed Hawk in the tree above her.
“The people have been really nice,” Chen said. “All the people know their stuff down to the littlest thing. It's kind of crazy. People are so specialized.”
Competing in Cape May
There are multiple categories teams compete in that are restricted to certain geographical boundaries or modes of transportation, with the biggest area spanning the entire state of New Jersey. Teams are usually composed of four to five people.
Participants identify the bird exclusively by sight or sound. At night, with little to no light, students rely mostly on sound to identify birds. Teams essentially pull all-nighters to tally as many birds as possible, according to Cao.
In last year’s World Series of Birding, Cornell’s state team tied for first place, tallying 213 birds in total.
This year, Cornell is sending four teams to compete under “Team Redheads”: a state team, a county team, an island team and a carbon-neutral team. The carbon-neutral team — which Cao is part of — restricts team members from utilizing cars. Cao colloquially referred to this team as the “biking team.”
In order to count birds toward the team total, each team member has to agree on an identification for a certain bird. If teammates disagree, the bird is considered a “dirty bird,” according to Cao.
“If you get one person missing that bird or not [identifying] that bird, you can still count it, but it's considered a dirty bird, and you're only allowed, I think it's 5 percent of dirty birds for your total list,” Cao said. “So you can have some, but because this World Series, it’s pretty trust and honor-based [and] they limit the number of dirty birds you can have.”
No Bird Left Behind: eBird Tracking
Cao and her teammates use eBird — a citizen science platform developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology — to keep track of the birds they identify. The World Series of birding largely operates digitally, so Cao has multiple checklists for different areas during the competition, which are all consolidated in one report at the end.
Brian Hofstetter ’26, an undergraduate researcher at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and social media chair for the Birding Club, emphasized that eBird is not only useful for birders when tracking data, but also that the data can then be used by scientists all over the world.
“[eBird has] well over a million users. I use it all the time and it’s really useful for scientists because they can see population trends, and they can understand migration better via eBird,” Hofstetter said. “It's a very collaborative community worldwide science platform.”
The World Series of Birding coincides with Global Big Day, an event run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology where people all over the world count up all of the species of birds seen that day and track the data on eBird in order to help researchers better understand global bird populations and promote birding.
“The idea is for everyone in the world to try and see as many species as they can, and visit as many places [as they can], and so that day is like a sort of global thing, and [the] World Series falls on that day just to keep it all kind of connected,” Hofstetter said.
To The World Series
Having participated in the World Series of Birding before, Cao said one of the parts she enjoys the most actually comes after the competition itself.
“One of my [favorite] parts of the World Series is after the day of the competition, they'll have a brunch for all the teams and all the participants,” Cao said. “It functions as an awards ceremony as well, but really it's just a nice event to kind of talk to all the people that you were competing with and see what they saw and kind of just connect with the community, which is really nice.”
Hofstetter said he enjoys the unique combination of a collaborative environment and a competitive event at the World Series of Birding.
“It's super fun, because there's sort of the challenge of trying to see the number of birds,” Hofstetter said. “There’s a sense of community there because our Cornell teams have been doing this for a really long time, so it's really fun to go and continue competing with the same group of people every year.”
