Author: Jin Jeong

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…

My grandfather kept chickens for most of his life, and the one thing I remember clearest is that his rooster never actually crowed only at…

The first time I actually understood why cuckoo clocks exist, I was in a Bavarian gift shop listening to a demo model, and it clicked…

I once stayed up half the night in the English countryside trying to figure out what was singing outside my window, convinced it had to…

A Black-capped Chickadee landed on my open palm once at a nature center, after I’d been standing there so still my arm was shaking, and…

The first time I heard a Common Loon at night, camping on a lake in northern Wisconsin, I genuinely sat up in the tent thinking…

My neighbor put up an Eastern Bluebird nest box in her yard three summers ago, mostly on a whim, and when a pair actually moved…

I watched a Peregrine Falcon fold its wings and drop out of the sky once, from a bridge over a river where a pair had…

A Carolina Wren built a nest in an old boot I’d left on my back porch one spring, and for weeks I tiptoed around my…

I used to feel a little uneasy watching Turkey Vultures circle over a field near my house — that slow, wobbling glide always seemed to…

Every fall, I hear them before I see them — that ragged, honking chorus drifting down from somewhere overhead, and I still stop whatever I’m…

The first time I saw a White Stork nest, it wasn’t in some storybook illustration — it was a massive, untidy pile of sticks sitting…

A single magpie showed up in my in-laws’ yard the week before a rough diagnosis in the family, and my mother-in-law, only half joking, immediately…

There’s a pair of ravens that work the ridge above a trailhead I hike sometimes, and they’re unmistakably different from the crows in the parking…

My grandmother had a pair of plastic pink flamingos stuck in her front lawn for as long as I can remember, faded from decades of…

I used to sit on a dock most summer evenings hoping to catch a Belted Kingfisher working the shallows, and most of the time all…

There’s a fishing pier near where I used to stay on the Gulf Coast where the same Brown Pelican showed up every evening around the…

I saw a peacock fan its tail at a small zoo once, and the sound alone caught me off guard before the display even fully…

A pair of Mute Swans showed up on the pond at my in-laws’ place every spring for years, and the thing that always struck me…

A Great Blue Heron stood absolutely motionless at the edge of a pond near my house for what must have been twenty minutes straight, waiting…

I saw my first wild Bald Eagle on a river trip in my twenties, and it’s genuinely one of those moments I still think about…

A Pileated Woodpecker went to work on a dead oak in my yard at 6 a.m. one morning, loud enough that it genuinely startled me…

A pair of Mourning Doves showed up at my wedding reception, of all places, landing on a fence right as the ceremony wrapped up. My…