Hillier Group

An architect's rendering of the new Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, viewed from across the duck pond.

Planners of the new Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, where construction will begin this month in anticipation of a Winter 2002 opening, face a daunting challenge: Retain all the features of the current lab that visitors love, eliminate conditions that lab staffers hate, add many more facilities and amenities, and don't trash the natural environment. In other words: Five times bigger, better and blended-in.

Visitors to the observatory section of the 86,500-square-foot, $26.5 million laboratory still will have close-up views of the waterfowl pond and feeding gardens, although this time it will be through an 84-foot-wide, two-story expanse of windows, and the new Treman Bird Feeding Garden will be many times larger. One story up, the glass-enclosed "tree house" will afford a real bird's-eye view of the world outside.

The cozy Fuertes Room will be recreated with the same teak paneling and paintings by the revered wildlife artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes, except that it soon will seat 160. A gallery will exhibit more Fuertes work that has been in storage or on-loan, as well as works by other artists.

Besides the ever-popular piped-in live sounds of outdoor birds, visitors at listening stations will sample recorded songs and calls from the vast collection of the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds. State-of-the-optical-art scopes and binoculars will be available for testing, before purchase, along with other birding paraphernalia in an enlarged retail shop, still operated as a Wild Birds Unlimited franchise.

Trails through the wildlife sanctuary, now one of Ithaca's favorite spots for bird-watching, walking and meditating, will be expanded with more accessibility for the handicapped. The walk-in-the-woods experience will start the moment visitors leave their cars or buses in a parking area that will be specially landscaped to disguise its much larger capacity.

And vehicles will enter the 220-acre sanctuary via a designated entrance from Route 13, rather than through the residential developments of Sapsucker Woods Road. Approaching the laboratory, visitors will wind past the so-called Goose Dung Pond, which will be landscaped with islands for avian visitors and trails and observation points for people.

The 102 lab staff members will say goodbye to the "temporary" trailers and crowded offices in Stuart Observatory and move to specially equipped spaces for programs such as: the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds, with three audio and video studios; the Bioacoustics Research program, with a large laboratory for research and a smaller one for students; the number-crunching Bird Population Studies program; the Citizen Science and Administration Pavilion, including a tele-video conferencing room and a geographic information system (GIS) laboratory; and the Birds.cornell.edu and BirdSource.edu web sites with more than 100 million pieces of information in their respective databases.

Staffers, students and visitors alike will be welcome in the second-floor library with its Adelson Reading/Reference Section and fireplace, study carrels, space for 12,000 volumes in its 2,225 square feet and views, through an atrium, to the birds outside.

Non-living things will move, too, as the university's entire vertebrate collection (birds, fish and herpetological specimens) abandons the warehouse-like space near the airport. The 1.5-million item Cornell Vertebrate Museum also will feature five laboratories, including a teaching lab for 35 students, as well as a radiology room.

But eco-doubters questioning whether all this can be squeezed into the "natural" environment might consider what Cornell ornithologists did once before: Beginning in the early 1950s, they "grew" the woods and created the wetlands from barren, spent farmland. Most of Sapsucker Woods wasn't so woodsy when ornithology moved from campus about 50 years ago. The natural process of succession filled in cow pastures, first with little trees and then bigger ones. Even the laboratory's natural-looking pond was man-made, and the thousands of resident and migrating birds navigating its 10-acre surface don't seem to mind.

"Now that we're a wetland, we have to get even wetter," said the ornithology lab's associate director Scott Sutcliffe. "Today's laws require that each wetland acre covered by new buildings and pavement must be replaced by two acres of wetland. We're doing that much and more." A new wetlands mosaic, to complement the existing sanctuary, has been designed by Boston-based landscape firm of Childs Associates in consultation with staff, students and faculty from Cornell and Syracuse University's College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

To accommodate new wetlands and other landscaping around the new building, which will be located just to the north of the current lab, Sapsucker Woods Road will be diverted to loop through the area now occupied by the temporary structures and the old "hawk barn," home to the Peregrine Project when that captive-breeding effort started at Cornell. Regularly scheduled shuttle buses will reduce the number of cars from campus and help students reach the new facility.

Covered with natural materials, including locally quarried Llenroc stone and textured cedar siding , the curvilinear structure from the New Jersey architectural firm, the Hillier Group, was designed to blend in -- and seemingly disappear into the earth from some vantage points. By holding the height to two stories, the new lab will not rise above nearby trees. From above, the building's "footprint" even resembles a bird -- albeit the stylized flying bird in the Lab of Ornithology logo. Real birds flying over will see visitors enter through the "beak." More details of the building are at the lab's web site: http://birds.cornell.edu/building/new_building.html.

"In the 1980s, we concentrated fund-raising efforts on building up the lab's research and education programs," said Sutcliffe, who has shepherded a highly successful fund-raising effort since 1985. "Now it's time to build the building." He notes that the lab is close to its fund-raising goal of $32 million, which includes a $5 million endowment for the facility. Almost all of the approvals from multiple municipalities, federal and state agencies and the university are in place. Sutcliffe and other lab administrators can already imagine the new place, filled with all the researchers, educators, students ... and visitors. Probably lots more of them.

"We really don't know how many visitors to expect," Sutcliffe said. "I guess this will put us on the map as a 'destination,' but we never really advertised before. You know, we only had one restroom."

That restroom and the rest of the old Stuart Observatory also will be demolished when the new lab opens. The spot where it stood, where 50 years of ornithological history was made, will return to nature as a bird-feeding garden.

For more information about the Lab's building project, visit birds.cornell.edu or call or e-mail Sutcliffe at 254-2424, sas10@cornell.edu.