Author: Jin Jeong

An Indigo Bunting once landed on a fence wire close enough that I could see the blue wasn’t really blue at all in the way…

A Rose-breasted Grosbeak showed up at my feeder one spring looking almost too vivid to be real, a jet-black-and-white bird with a splash of rose-red…

Camping in the Appalachians as a kid, I remember lying awake listening to a whip-poor-will repeat its own name over and over from somewhere in…

It’s a strange thing to realize that most New Zealanders go their whole lives without ever seeing a wild kiwi, given how completely the bird…

A trip to Australia’s outback once put me face to face with an emu that was, without exaggeration, taller than I expected any bird to…

Percy Bysshe Shelley never actually saw the skylark he was writing about in his famous 1820 poem, at least not for most of it —…

Watching a wagtail walk across a parking lot, its long tail pumping up and down with almost every single step, it’s hard not to read…

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…