Bird Biology And Behavior

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…

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…