Author: Jin Jeong

A hunting guide once explained to me that “snipe hunt” became a classic prank phrase specifically because the bird itself is so genuinely hard to…

The first time I heard a curlew’s long, bubbling, downward-sliding call rolling across an open mudflat at dusk, I understood immediately why so many older…

Every spring I try, mostly without success, to keep up with the wave of warblers that passes through my backyard for about two weeks and…

There’s a particular kind of hypnotic quality to watching a small flock of sandpipers chase the edge of retreating waves on a beach, darting forward…

Watching an Arctic Tern hover and dive along a rocky coastline, it’s easy to assume you’re looking at a fairly ordinary seabird having a fairly…

I once stood in a marsh for ten minutes trying to find the source of a strange, deep, repetitive thumping sound that resembled someone driving…

A ranger in the Rockies once told me that a single Clark’s Nutcracker I was watching bury seeds along a ridgeline would, over the course…

I once watched a Brown Thrasher work through a single patch of leaf litter for a solid ten minutes, flinging debris in every direction with…

I once spent a full minute convinced a stray cat was hiding somewhere in a thicket behind my yard before I realized the mewing sound…

The first time someone told me an Eastern Towhee’s call sounds like it’s saying “drink-your-tea,” I dismissed it as one of those cute birding mnemonics…

Every year around the same week in late fall, a small flock of slate-gray birds with flashing white tail feathers shows up under my feeder,…

The first time I watched a warbler feed a Brown-headed Cowbird chick nearly twice its own size, standing on tiptoe to stuff food into a…

I grew up hearing a Northern Bobwhite calling from a fencerow behind my grandfather’s place every summer evening, and it took me years to realize…

A nature documentary showing an Emperor Penguin colony huddled through an Antarctic winter storm, thousands of birds slowly rotating positions so no single penguin stayed…

I got to stand near an ostrich enclosure at a wildlife park once and was struck by how little it resembled the cartoon version I’d…

I always assumed a toucan’s bill had to be heavy given how enormous it looks relative to the rest of the bird, and it turns…

Seeing a California Condor in the wild is rare enough that when I finally watched one ride a thermal above a canyon in Big Sur,…

A friend who studies grassland birds once showed me a fence line with several grasshoppers, a lizard, and a mouse all impaled neatly on the…

A flock of Cedar Waxwings descended on a berry-heavy holly tree outside my kitchen window one winter and stripped it almost bare in under an…

A Scarlet Tanager showed up in a maple tree in my backyard for exactly one morning during spring migration, and the color was so intensely,…

A Common Grackle used to stand on my neighbor’s chimney every evening catching the last light in a way that made its supposedly “black” feathers…

I grew up thinking the sound coming from the fence posts along my grandparents’ pasture every summer morning was just “prairie noise” until someone finally…

I finally saw a Greater Roadrunner in the wild outside Tucson, and the thing that struck me wasn’t the speed everyone talks about — it…

A Killdeer nested in the gravel of a parking lot at my old job, which sounds like a joke but is exactly the kind of…

I saw my first White Ibis in a drainage canal behind a strip mall in Florida, calmly probing the mud with its long curved bill…

A friend who does seabird research in Iceland once told me that puffins spend nearly all year alone at sea, far from any cliff or…

A pair of Baltimore Orioles found the orange halves I’d left out on a whim one spring, and within a day I had a bright…

I used to think seagulls were just the birds that steal your fries at the beach, until I watched a flock of them ride a…

My grandmother kept a canary in her kitchen for as long as I can remember, and I always assumed it was just a nice, easy…

I spotted my first American Kestrel hovering over a highway median, of all places, holding almost perfectly still in the air with rapid, shallow wingbeats…

Every year the swallows come back to the eaves of a barn near my uncle’s farm, rebuilding the same mud nests in the same corners…

A covey of California Quail used to cross the trail near my parents’ house every evening at almost the exact same time, single file, topknot…

A Northern Mockingbird took up residence outside my college dorm window one spring, and for about three weeks straight it ran through what sounded like…

I only ever encountered an albatross secondhand — through Coleridge’s poem, forced on me in high school, long before I understood anything about the actual…

I used to dismiss city pigeons as basically background noise — until I read about the WWII messenger pigeon program and realized the same species…

My daughter got a house finch nest tucked into a hanging plant on our porch two summers ago, and what struck me wasn’t the nest…

There’s a Eurasian Blackbird that sings from the same chimney pot in my aunt’s neighborhood every spring evening, and the first time I really listened…

I watched a murmuration by accident once, driving home near a reservoir at dusk, and had to actually pull over because I couldn’t process what…

A friend of mine inherited her grandmother’s African Grey parrot, a bird that had apparently outlived two family pets and picked up an unsettling habit…

A mallard hen raised eleven ducklings in the drainage ditch behind my office building one spring, and for about six weeks the entire parking lot…