Arthur Augustus Allen (1885-1964) received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1911 (see Plate 67). In 1954, Lyman Stuart (1840-1923) and others acquired land where Arthur A. Allen and Louis Agassiz Fuertes (1874-1927) found the nest of a Yellow-bellied Woodpecker. The bird is known today as the Yellow-bellied sapsucker (see Plate 112). The land was then donated to Cornell University for the purpose of establishing a bird sanctuary that was named Sapsucker Woods. While it might have been remarkable that the nest of a Yellow-bellied sapsucker was found so far to the south, John James Audubon found nests of the Yellow-bellied sapsucker even further south in Kentucky. “A few breed there; but the greater number return to the middle and especially the northern parts of the Union.”
In 2002, Cornell and the National Audubon Society created for the internet a website called e-Bird. Wherever in the world a person, or citizen scientist, can access the website, they can enter the list of birds that they saw and their numbers. These lists are then stored and made available for other users to see which birds are occurring where, when, and in what numbers. The lists are reviewed by scientists to maintain the integrity of the species and the counts. While millions of birds have been reported on e-Bird, no one has come even remotely close to documenting the variety of species, locations, and counts that appear in Birds of America. Furthermore, through e-Bird and other studies since 1970, Cornell estimates that the total population of birds in North America has fallen by as much as three billion. Based on the counts in Birds of America, three billion birds is only fraction of the number that John James Audubon saw in his lifetime.