View from Sapsucker Woods: Turning Disruption into Opportunity

From the Autumn 2025 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.

“How’s the Cornell Lab doing?”

It’s a question that I am often asked these days. Many sectors of society are facing significant disruption, including universities, federal agencies, and conservation nonprofit groups. This poses challenges for organizations’ ability to do their work, as well as the communities they support and the individuals involved. And yet turbulent times are important because they are often periods of rapid and lasting transformation. They are the times when we build the foundations for what comes next; the times we discover of what we are made and of what we are capable. And so, they are not a time to freeze or hide. They’re a time to step up.

What does that mean for the Cornell Lab? First off, because of your support, we are in a strong, stable financial position. Although we have seen some substantial grants and contracts wound down, the majority of our operating funds now come from the generous support of our members and other gifts. That means we can—we must—continue to invest in key areas, to harness rapid advances in technology, and to forge even deeper partnerships. We have the opportunity to be bold.

Partnerships are particularly important in this context because, while the Cornell Lab remains relatively secure, many of our partners are navigating significant financial constraints. And it is through our partners that we often have our greatest impact. That’s true in the United States, where federal agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Park Service play key roles in implementing environmental policies. It’s also true for our international partnerships (we now work in about 100 countries), where almost all of our partners have benefited from USAID. The Cornell Lab can’t replace the role of U.S. federal agencies in implementing policy or the on-the-ground conservation work of our international partners. But we can accelerate the adoption of new technologies and participatory science to help make their work as efficient and effective as possible. We are being asked to step up in a way like never before.

Rather than back away, therefore, we will deepen our relationships with U.S. federal agencies to build a resilient system to monitor bird populations, and ensure the information is freely available at federal, state, and local scales. We will accelerate the adoption of new technologies and participatory science to create a resilient, global information system for birds and biodiversity more broadly. We will expand the horizons of our Merlin Bird ID smartphone app and our other digital engagement platforms even further, so as to inspire people around the world to care about birds and take action to protect nature. And we will continue to invest in training the next generation of leaders, building capacity around the world in support of biodiversity.

Through these turbulent times, every data point we collect, every decision-maker we empower, every future leader we train, and every person we inspire, is disproportionately important because there are fewer organizations that have the freedom and resources to do those things. The same is true for the support you give us: every dollar is especially valuable because resources are so much more constrained, and yet the needs are so much greater. Thank you for your support and for your trust to use those resources well. It pushes the Cornell Lab to continue to be bold, to think ahead, to invest, to support our partners, and to redouble our efforts in saving birds and driving conservation impact.