2024 was a year of achievements for eBird, Merlin, the Macaulay Library, and Birds of the World. The global birding community set incredible benchmarks for scientific data collection. New features and updated resources made birding accessible to more people worldwide than ever before. Best of all—you helped to make it possible.
Your birding made a difference, inspiring tens of millions of people who accessed Cornell Lab of Ornithology resources this year to learn, study, and conserve bird populations. To the more than 122,000 new eBirders and 7.5 million new Merlin users who joined us for the first time in 2024, welcome! We also appreciate and thank our eBird Supporters for their monthly contribution.
Let’s take a moment to reflect and celebrate the remarkable milestones that you helped to accomplish. Thank you.
- Enhancing Birding Experiences
- Facilitating Access to Bird Information
- Advancing our Understanding of Bird Populations
- Building Community Connections
- Exciting Milestones and Growth
- Looking Ahead
Enhancing Birding Experiences
Improved eBird Region Pages provide up-to-date stats and new ways to explore observations through public eBird Trip Reports. Engaging with the global eBird partner network is easier than ever through resources and content shared by eBird regional teams.
The eBird and Merlin apps feature a refreshed, unified design and new menu layouts to streamline navigation. The eBird app also offers a more detailed GPS track editing screen. Android devices can now edit GPS tracks on submitted eBird checklists and we look forward to expanding this functionality to iOS devices in 2025.
Nearly a million people have already explored their Bird of the Day in Merlin. This fun feature helps you to learn about nearby birds. Challenge yourself to find your Bird of the Day in the field! Each day brings a different Bird of the Day opportunity.
Have you found your Merlin Bird of the Day today? White-crowned Sparrow © Mason Maron / Macaulay Library.
Merlin moments are even better with more ways to share birding adventures through the Merlin app. Send species to friends and family directly from your Life List, Bird of the Day, Explore Birds, and Sound ID results with a single tap. Compatible with most messaging and social media platforms, this new feature is perfect for celebrating new ID and species milestones with others.
Additional improvements in Merlin include New Life List suggestions to help you to find your next life bird based on possible species in your area. Merlin now also comes with a single image for each species, so you never have to wonder what a bird looks like if you don’t have a relevant regional pack installed.
The addition of “Additional species” to the Macaulay Library search tool makes it easier to search for background species in photos and sound recordings that contain multiple bird species. For example, media files with Canada Goose in the background.
Enhanced spectrograms allow for a better experience when viewing and exploring sound recordings in the Macaulay Library. In addition to displaying a larger range of frequencies in sharper detail, updated spectrograms support longer sound recordings, and are faster to load and listen to.
Exciting Developments Behind the Scenes:
- Successful server upgrades and full database migration to a more reliable and scalable cloud-based infrastructure.
- Updates to the account login system shared by eBird, Merlin, Birds of the World, and other Cornell Lab projects enhance the security and functionality of our platforms.
- A significant update to Merlin’s Photo ID model boosts accuracy in identifying birds from photographs, anywhere in the world.
- eBird regional teams in Chile and New Zealand assisted with eBird Status reviews for their countries in preparation for the next eBird Status & Trends release.
- Continued improvements to how GPS track data is stored in the eBird database.
Facilitating Access to Bird Information
The Cornell Lab continues to expand global free access to Birds of the World, its premier ornithological reference tool. These deep, authoritative life histories of every bird species are now freely available to dozens of conservation and ornithological associations, and anyone in Central and South America, Africa, and the Middle East. If you or someone you know finds the subscription fee a roadblock to access, please contact the Birds of the World team to request a digital access scholarship.
We took Birds of the World one step further launching a Spanish-language version of Birds of the World this past fall. The Spanish translations were well received and we expect to release other language translations in the not-too-distant future.
Birds of the World science content is now available in Spanish.
The Chappuis audio collection, recorded by the late Claude Chappuis, has a new home in the Macaulay Library archives. The Chappuis collection is the world’s largest and highest-quality collection of bird sounds yet to be incorporated into a public sound archive. Its particular strength is African and Central Asian birds. It contains recordings of hundreds of seldom-recorded species—including 28 new species for the Macaulay audio archive—and even extinct species like the Slender-billed Curlew (Numenius tenuirostris). We are grateful to the family of Claude Chappuis, represented by his daughter Anne, for making Claude’s legacy available to the Macaulay Library; it is an honor to have this important resource in our care. The Macaulay Library team has embarked on the long process of digitizing the full Chappuis collection with over 250 recordings archived so far.
In 2024, eBird Trends results were incorporated into US State-level eBird Data Summaries—free eBird data resources to support the information needs of state wildlife agencies including updates to federally mandated State Wildlife Action Plans.
Through a transformative collaboration between Cornell Lab and Birdlife South Africa, eBird and Merlin are now available in isiZulu. This powerful initiative expands birding opportunities to a broader South African audience and allows them to foster a deeper connection with nature as a result.
Also new for 2024 are Hong Kong (English) and Hong Kong (Simplified Chinese) bird names. This brings the total number of bird common name languages supported by eBird, Merlin, the Macaulay Library, and Birds of the World to 99 languages and regional dialects. With the addition of Italian this year, eBird now supports 18 languages throughout eBird.org and 36 languages in the eBird app. Merlin supports 24 languages.
Our immense appreciation to the volunteer translators whose dedication to providing and maintaining bird names makes birding and conservation more accessible.
Advancing our Understanding of Bird Populations
Your bird observations, photos, and sound recordings play a central role in developing new conservation resources and monitoring bird populations on a global scale. In 2024, researchers published more than 248 peer-reviewed articles incorporating eBird data. This brings the total number of scientific publications using eBird data to over 1,180! To-date, eBird Status and Trends data products have been downloaded more than 2 million times.
Observations from eBirders were incorporated into the 2024 State of Canada’s Birds, where they help to paint a detailed picture of conservation successes and emerging threats to Canada’s birds over the past several decades.
A team of Kenyan conservationists used eBird data alongside data from the Kenya Bird Map and a historical bird atlas to map changes in Kenyan bird distribution. To help conservation projects utilize these results, they built an interactive public platform where visitors can explore shifts in Kenya’s bird populations over the last half-century.
eBirding also supports members of the Cornell Lab’s Land Trust Bird Conservation Initiative. This network of conservation groups utilize eBird to monitor birds, assess land management practices, and prioritize conservation activities across their service areas. Visit Land Trusts Using eBird to see how land trusts have integrated eBird into their work.
eBird data are now included in the African Bird Atlas Project—a continent-wide effort to gather bird observations used to support research and conservation efforts. This collaboration resulted in a 16% increase in trip cards in ABAP! Moving forward, checklists submitted to eBird in areas with regional ABAP projects will automatically contribute when they meet ABAP data requirements.
Green areas are new data contributed to the Africa Bird Atlas Project from eBird checklists.
This year, media archived in the Macaulay Library were used in studies spanning numerous disciplines including taxonomy, natural history, and conservation. ML photos tagged as “Foraging or eating” are elucidating the diet preferences of species at a scale never before imaginable. The Macaulay Library media archive was used as the data foundation to identify ‘lost’ bird species—those for which there has been no documentation in over 10 years—as well as to support the designation of new species and even map migratory movements. We look forward to seeing the innovative use of the archive for science and conservation in 2025.
The Macaulay Library now features an “Aberrant Individual” tag, enabling users to label and filter photos and videos of birds with unusual physical traits such as albinism, leucism, melanism, bill deformities, and other phenotypic oddities not related to injury. This highly anticipated feature makes it easier to study these traits and how they influence bird biology and behavior. By documenting atypical traits and tagging your photos on eBird, you’ll be assisting researchers like Ecuadorian ornithologist Héctor Cadena, who has spent years investigating the causes and impacts of these anomalies.
Building Community Connections
The exciting advances made by eBird, Merlin, the Macaulay Library, and Birds of the World over the past year are only possible thanks to the efforts of thousands of contributors, volunteers, partners, and collaborators around the world.
We are thrilled to welcome two new eBird regional teams—eBird Italia and eBird Uganda.
Birds of the World formalized content collaborations with 15 new partner organizations, bringing our scientific alliance up to 35 global ornithological societies, conservation organizations, and species working groups. Additions to this esteemed group in 2024 include Aves Uruguay, The A.P. Leventis Ornithological Research Institute (West Africa); OSME (Ornithological Society of the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia); Universidad de San Francisco Quito; Aves Honduras; and the Heron Specialist Group. These partners are contributing scientific expertise to the platform and helping to promote awareness of BOW’s authoritative platform in their respective regions.
More than 2,566 volunteer reviewers and Hotspot editors oversee eBird data quality in 253 countries, territories, or dependencies. We sincerely appreciate their hard work! Get to know a few of these indispensable volunteers in our eBird Reviewer Spotlight series.
The 15th annual Young Birders Event brought together 16 high school-aged students from around the world for an enriching weekend of learning, hands-on workshops, and, of course, lots of birding! Students met Cornell Lab staff members and researchers to learn about career paths in ornithology.
The 2024-2025 season of free Birds of the World Discovery webinars continues to connect broad audiences with experts on ornithological topics ranging from taxonomy to technology. This season also featured the first session conducted entirely in Spanish, “Rapaces de Bosque Poco Conocidas en el Neotrópico” featuring Tomás Rivas Fuenzalida and hosted by Fernando Medrano. Stay tuned for more webinars in 2025!
eBird, Merlin, Birds of the World, and Macaulay Library staff members hosted meetings, workshops, and presentations at multiple international events including Global Birdfair in England, Feria de Aves de Sudamérica in Argentina, and the EuroBirdPortal Annual Meeting in Montenegro. The Birds of the World team crisscrossed the globe from China to Chile developing new content collaborations at international science meetings.
In collaboration with local partners, we were able to host a record-setting number of sound recording and data collection workshops across five continents, including successful training events in India, Ecuador, Argentina, Australia, Switzerland, and Uganda. Look for our teams at more conferences and gatherings in 2025!
Thanks to the generosity of ZEISS, we awarded more than 15 eBirders free ZEISS binoculars in 2024. We are excited to continue working with ZEISS on eBirder of the Month awards in 2024 to thank the eBird community.
eBird partners with the Cornell Lab’s Bird Academy to offer you exciting educational resources in thanks for your eBirding. More than 100 eBirders won access to free Bird Academy courses this year.
Exciting Milestones and Growth
To-date, more than 1 million people have shared their bird observations through eBird and 23 million people have discovered the magic of Merlin Bird ID.
eBirders from every country in the world have together contributed more than 1.9 billion bird observations to eBird, including more than 268 million observations submitted this year alone. 2024 also marked our biggest Taxonomic Update ever in terms of number of updated records.
As our communities continue to grow in exciting new ways, we updated the eBird and Merlin Community Guidelines to foster inclusivity, responsible birding, and accurate data collection.
A phenomenal 1.3 million people celebrated birds on Global Big Day, with over 63,000 birders submitting a record-setting 156,000 eBird checklists. The success continued on October Big Day, when birders collectively documented over 7,800 species in a single day, breaking a world record and marking the most successful October Big Day to date.
Mark your calendar for the next Global Big Day—10 May 2025, and October Big Day—11 Oct 2025.
In the past year, 11.8 million people used Merlin’s bird identification resources—up 40% over last year—and more than 1.4 million people added 25 million Merlin identifications to their life lists.
The latest update for Sound ID in Merlin now covers 1,382 species with expanded species coverage in the Neotropics, India, and Western Palearctic. Nearly 9 million people identified songs and calls with Sound ID—double the number of people who used Sound ID in 2023!
More recordists and photographers archived their media in the Macaulay Library in the past year than ever before. In 2024:
- Recordists contributed more than 523,000 recordings.
- Photographers added more than 13 million photos.
Thank you for helping the Macaulay Library continue to be a leading resource of media for education and ornithological research! Take a look at the top photos and top recordings of 2024.
Advancements in Birds of the World in 2024:
- 380 species account revisions in 2024
- Expansion to 11,145 species accounts, in accordance with the 2024 eBird/Clements taxonomy revisions
- Growth of our global editorial network to 2215 scientific experts and 35 conservation partners
- More than 75,000 active users, and a million more casual users.
- An increase of 2 million page views for a total 15 million page views per year.
eBird, Merlin, Macaulay Library, and Birds of the World were excited to welcome 9 new team members this year to support research, content development, UI design, software engineering, database management, archival coordination, and more. Several positions remain open or are coming soon, visit the eBird Jobs page for details!
What’s Ahead?
Below are just a few of the developments we’re looking forward to in 2025:
- 2 billion bird observations in eBird (in a quarter of the time it took to reach the first billion!)
- Updated and expanded eBird Status & Trends maps for more species.
- eBird Projects: a scalable, streamlined framework for existing eBird protocols.
- Upload checklist media in addition to species observation media.
- Further GPS track improvements in the eBird app.
Become an eBird Supporter for early access to future tools and upcoming developments plus other great benefits.
Thank you for making this possible
Together, eBirder’s have made tremendous strides in data collection, helping to inform conservation action and support birds.
We can’t wait to see what we can do together in 2025. Please stay in touch! Subscribe to our eNews or follow us on social media: