Kevin J. McGowan

I have been interested in animals, and pretty much only animals, my entire life. I have been fortunate to be able to make a living studying and teaching about birds. I started studying crows in an attempt to preserve my sanity while writing up my Ph.D. dissertation on Florida Scrub-Jay social development. It worked, and I have been studying all aspects of the biology of American Crows, and to a lesser extent Fish Crows, for over 25 years. They are fascinating animals, and I continue to see new things every time I watch them. I was the Associate Curator of the bird and mammal collections at the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates, and am now in the Education section of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I am the instructor for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s distance learning courses, including the long-running Home Study Course in Bird Biology, the online course Investigating Behavior: Courtship and Rivalry in Birds, and the Be a Better Birder online tutorials and ornithology webinars. I was one of the creators of the Lab’s All About Birds website, one of the most popular bird sites on the internet. After that, I was the co-editor and primary author for the book, The Second Atlas of Breeding Birds in New York State. In a previous century I was an internet pioneer. I helped make the Cornell collections one of the first institutions in the world to have their specimen data available through the internet. I was one of the first people to post photographs of rare birds on the World Wide Web, and I created web sites for professional and non-professional bird organizations. Now, I can barely remember enough passwords to do the things I need to do, and depend on savvy people with far more computer skills than I have to get things done. But that's okay, because I'd rather think about birds than computers, anyway.

January 2014