As part of its commitment to update and expand ornithology content on the world’s birds, the Cornell Lab invites regional content partnerships with NGOs, universities and other contributors. There are already numerous partnerships with science organisations throughout South America, the Caribbean and Africa, including BirdLife. Since summer 2025 OSME is a Partner of Cornell. Experts within the OSME region are currently working on species account updates, including Cyprus Wheatear and Syrian Serin. More species accounts are in the works as well as an initiative to mold excerpts from Sandgrouse papers into relevant species accounts. All this to make the wonderful world of birds and ornithology freely available to people!

OSME has partnered with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to make Birds of the World, a global ornithology platform, free and open for anyone living within the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Scholarly information on the birds of Africa is more accessible than ever thanks to Birds of the World (birdsoftheworld.org), a scholarly online platform featuring authoritative, in-depth species profiles that document the life histories of every bird species and every bird family in the world. It is a highly upgraded fusion of four predecessor publications: Handbook of Birds of the World Alive, Birds of North America, Neotropical Birds, andBird Families of the World, withnew scholarly content being added every week. This massive resource is published by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (the Cornell Lab), a non-profit bird conservation organization based at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, USA. Having once been a fee-based subscription, the resource is now freely available throughout the OSME region to anyone with a Cornell Lab/eBird account.

Birds of the World features both long- and short-form scholarly accounts with content submitted by keen ornithologists (both amateur and professionals) and media contributors. This includes data on bird ID, habitat, diet, demography, distribution and abundance, breeding, behavior, and conservation that has been summarized from the primary literature. The resource is integrated with the Macaulay Library, a stand-alone wildlife media archive (macaulaylibrary.org) with media that supports the texts and aids bird identification. It also contains distribution and abundance maps from eBird (ebird.org), which after 20 years delivers increasingly precise data and visualizations about bird population patterns.

Birds of the World features comprehensive species accounts for the world’s 11,000+ species. Each account has maps, data, multimedia, and in-depth coverage of the natural history of each species.

To access Birds of the World, visit birdsoftheworld.org and click ’Sign In’ to create an account (or enter with your existing eBird username). Users can select their preferred language for common names: just click ‘Preferences.’  Then start exploring Birds of the World and share the resource with friends and colleagues. Do you have expertise knowledge of a bird species in our region, and want to get involved with a species account? Contact us below!

For more information and queries on Birds of the World in the OSME region, contact OSME Youth Development Officer, Tomas Axén Haraldsson (youthdevelopment@osme.org), or Birds of the World communications manager, Laura Kammermeier (lmk25@cornell.edu).