Bird Biology And Behavior

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…

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…