Donald Kroodsma, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, was a chemistry major at Hope College but discovered birds in a local Michigan marsh during his last semester. That summer he attended the University of Michigan “Bug Camp” at Pellston, taking both “baby birds” and “big birds” courses simultaneously; it was there, in 1968, that Olin Sewall Pettingill Jr. asked him to record a few birds for Cornell’s Library of Natural Sounds (now the Macaulay Library). Six months later, in his backyard in Corvallis, Oregon, while attending graduate school at Oregon State University, a singing wren caught his ear and started him on a life-long journey to understanding birdsong. Kroodsma has edited three scholarly volumes on birdsong and published numerous papers in both scholarly journals and popular magazines. In 2003, he received the Elliott Coues Award from the American Ornithologists’ Union, recognizing him as the “reigning authority on avian vocal behavior.” A few months later he retired from an academic career to give his full attention to studying birdsong and sharing his passion with popular, non-academic audiences.His first book, The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong, won the 2006 John Burroughs Medal Award for outstanding natural history writing and the 2006 American Birding Association’s Robert Ridgway Award for excellence.

“Young songbirds must learn their songs from singing adults, much like we learn our speech from adult humans.”

Larry McQueen, originally from Mifflinburg, Pennsylvania, earned a degree in wildlife conservation from Idaho State University and studied art at the University of Oregon. McQueen’s artistic work is widely known, having appeared in catalogs of ecotourism, calendars, ornithological journals, magazines, and books, and his paintings have been exhibited in museums in this country and abroad. His work appears throughout the Cornell Lab’s Web site, as well as that of BirdSource. He has produced a number of garden-bird posters for “Windsor Nature Discovery Publications” and for the Cornell Lab’s own FeederWatch project. His bird plates can be found in many field guides, including the National Audubon Society Master Guide to Birding, the American Bird Conservancy’s All The Birds, Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, Birds of South Asia—The Ripley Guide, and Birds of Peru. McQueen now lives in Eugene, Oregon, where he produces his own paintings.

Jon Janosik began his professional career as an assistant illustrator at the Yale University Peabody Museum. Since then, his work has been featured in such books as Birds of the Ligonier Valley, the National Audubon Society Master Guide to Birding, An Audubon Handbook: Western/Eastern Birds, Book of North American Birds, and Field Guide to North American Birds. Janosik’s work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries, including the Smithsonian (Washington, D.C.), the Carnegie Museum (Pittsburgh, PA), the British Museum (London, England), the Royal Scottish Academy (Edinburgh, Scotland), and the Kobe Museum (Sanda, Japan). Having traveled worldwide to study birds, Janosik now devotes most of his time to painting commissions from international collectors at his home in the Willamette Valley region of Oregon.