Founded in 2007, Celebrate Urban Birds is a year-round project developed and launched by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Its primary purpose is to reach diverse urban audiences who do not already participate in science or scientific investigation.

Another of our goals is to collect high-quality data from participants that will provide us with valuable knowledge of how different environments will influence the location of birds in urban areas.

In the last 10 years, CUBs has partnered with over 12,000 community-based organizations, distributed more than 500,000 educational kits, and awarded dozens of mini-grants. Over 90% of our partner organizations work with underserved audiences. Our participants range in age from preschoolers and kindergartners to seniors, and more than 75% have little or no experience with birds.


Despite our name, we are not restricted to dense city environments. Our sixteen target focal species can be found in a wide range of environments throughout North America (we send educational materials to and collect data from Canada and Mexico too), and we love to hear about and support projects that involve the arts, neighborhood greening or other community habitat-creation efforts!

We hope you can learn from our website and kits, just as we’ll learn about our focal bird species from you — click here to get started!