Author: Jin Jeong

I once stood under a single acacia tree in Namibia holding what looked like an entire haystack woven into the branches, and realized it was…

A forest guide in Borneo pointed out the whooshing sound of a Great Hornbill’s wingbeats long before we saw the bird itself, a sound so…

I watched a Hoopoe fan its crest open and shut like a hand of cards while probing a lawn in southern Spain, and understood immediately…

A guide in the Guatemalan highlands once told me that spotting a Resplendent Quetzal on your first try was supposed to mean good luck for…

Watching a Black Skimmer fly low over calm water with its oversized lower bill slicing a perfectly straight line through the surface, snapping shut the…

A White-tailed Tropicbird trailing its impossibly long central tail streamers behind it in flight looked, from a distance over open ocean, less like a seabird…

Watching a Jacana walk casually across a mat of floating lily pads without so much as a ripple of disturbance, as if the water simply…

Hearing a Southern Screamer’s call roll across an Argentine wetland for the first time, loud enough to carry more than a mile in open country,…

Watching a Red-legged Seriema repeatedly slam a captured snake against the ground with sharp, deliberate strikes, I understood immediately why paleontologists studying this bird’s closest…

A group of Gray-winged Trumpeters foraging together through the Amazon undergrowth stayed in such tight, coordinated formation that they reminded me less of a flock…

A Sunbittern standing still along a Central American riverbank looks unremarkable, mostly brown and gray, until it opens its wings in a threat display and…

Learning that the Kakapo is a flightless, nocturnal parrot that can weigh up to nine pounds and lives for potentially sixty years or more sounds…

Captain Cook’s crew reportedly described the dawn chorus of New Zealand Bellbirds and Tuis together as sounding like the pealing of distant, perfectly tuned bells,…

A Tui once sang from a flowering flax bush in a Wellington garden for nearly ten minutes straight, cycling through what sounded like a dozen…

Standing at the mouth of a cave in Trinidad known to house thousands of Oilbirds, the sound alone, a dense, overlapping chorus of harsh clicks…

A photo of a Potoo perched upright on a broken tree stump, eyes closed, body angled to look exactly like an extension of the wood…

The Takahe was declared extinct for nearly fifty years before a small population was rediscovered in a remote New Zealand valley in 1948, a genuine…

A Kea once methodically dismantled the rubber window seal on a parked car at a New Zealand ski field while a small crowd of tourists…

New Caledonia’s Kagu is sometimes called a “ghost of the forest” by local guides, a nickname that makes immediate sense once you see the bird’s…

The first photo I ever saw of a Shoebill, standing motionless with its enormous, clog-shaped bill and an unblinking stare directly at the camera, looked…

Watching a Secretarybird stomp a snake to death with rapid, precise kicks on the African savanna is one of those nature documentary moments that looks…

A flock of Roseate Spoonbills lifting off a Gulf Coast mudflat, all bright pink against gray water, is dramatic enough that more than one person…

Camping near a Florida wetland, I woke up convinced someone nearby was being genuinely, seriously hurt, before realizing the blood-curdling wail echoing through the dark…

The first time I saw an Anhinga perched on a branch with its wings fully spread and completely motionless, I assumed it was injured or…

Standing on a Scottish cliff top watching thousands of Northern Gannets fold their wings and drop from 100 feet into the sea below, one after…

Blue-footed Boobies performing their exaggerated, high-stepping courtship walk on a rocky outcrop always draws a crowd of tourists laughing at how deliberately silly the display…

Watching a male Magnificent Frigatebird inflate a bright red throat pouch to roughly the size of a beach ball during a courtship display, I understood…

The first time I heard an audio recording of a Superb Lyrebird perfectly reproducing a camera shutter, a car alarm, and another bird’s call in…

A boat guide on a tributary of the Amazon once pointed out a Hoatzin perched awkwardly in a riverside tree and, before I could ask…

Rangers in tropical North Queensland warn visitors to keep a respectful distance from cassowaries with a seriousness usually reserved for large predators, and after learning…

An Eastern Phoebe has rebuilt a mud-and-moss nest on the same porch light fixture at my parents’ house for what is, at this point, more…

A Golden-crowned Kinglet foraging in a snowy spruce once struck me as almost absurdly small to be surviving a night that was, by the weather…

A Red-eyed Vireo once sang from the same stretch of forest canopy near my house for what felt like an entire afternoon, question-and-answer phrases repeated…

A farmer friend once pointed out a male Bobolink singing over a hayfield and said, only half-joking, that the bird sounded like it was playing…