Imagine the nesting cliff of Common Murres, 100 feet above the ocean. Suddenly, a small murre chick, only three weeks old and just one-quarter the weight of an adult, lunges off the cliff, gliding clumsily to the water below. Soon other chicks follow, splashing into the sea. The chicks'…

A young bird's nest is its first home. But most birds don't live in a nest year round, even at night. By August, many birds have left the nest behind. So, after they spend the day flying and foraging, where do they go at night? What most birds do at night is roost: they find a safe place…

Writer Ivan Doig wrote about bird songs, including that of this Western Meadowlark, in his book, Ride with Me, Mariah Montana: "Warbles and trills and solo after solo ... the air was magically busy. None of us spoke while the songs of the birds poured undiluted. I suppose we were afraid…

In the early 1980s, the city of Austin, Texas needed to enlarge its Congress Avenue Bridge. The new bridge design included expansion joints that inadvertently created roosting cavities for bats - tiny Mexican Free-tailed Bats - eventually one and one-half million of them! At first, many…

Brown-headed Cowbirds lay their eggs in other birds' nests. And these birds raise the cowbird chicks - often at the expense of their own young. This beautiful Yellow Warbler is a frequent target of the cowbird's unwelcome eggs. But it has developed a way to reject the role of foster parent…

Williamson's Sapsuckers nest in western mountain forests. The radically different plumages of the male and female so confounded 19th-century naturalists that, for nearly a decade, the birds were thought to be of different species. Sapsuckers are unique among woodpeckers in drilling neat…

Red flowers, and of course red feeders, are often rich sources of food for hummingbirds, including this Broad-tailed Hummingbird. Nectar is high-octane fuel for their intensely active way of life. The hummingbirds' sense of color is due to the dense concentration of cones in its retina…

As the sun sets on a northern Midwest forest, an American Woodcock walks slowly from the cover of the forest to a nearby clearing. Then, the woodcock takes off on a courtship flight. At the apex of its flight, the woodcock circles, then descends in a slow spiral, putt-putting like a tiny…

A male Montezuma Oropendola holds forth in a tree bedecked with twenty or more hanging nests. The nests are intricately woven sacks hanging three feet or more from the branches. Oropendolas favor trees that are separate from other trees and often build near large nests of wasps, whose…

At a display area, known as a lek, the male Greater Sage-Grouse perform for mating rights, while the smaller females look on. Today, the Greater Sage-Grouse is seriously endangered, its fate intertwined with the loss of sage habitat. Millions of acres have been converted to cropland, and…