Chicago’s Michigan Avenue – with towering glass skyscrapers and fancy boutiques – is the last place you’d expect to see a bird that normally hides in freshwater marshes. Yet, during migration, secretive Virginia Rails like this one pass over the city at night. That is, until they hit a…

The Black-capped Chickadees of Fairbanks, Alaska, endure nights as cold as 40 degrees below zero. Dr. Susan Sharbaugh, a scientist at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has studied them. She says that each chickadee wedges itself into a tiny cavity. Then…

Who among us hasn’t almost walked into a glass door? Birds though, especially when migrating, run the risk of colliding with reflective glass in urban areas. With millions of birds dying from collisions every year, it’s heartening to know that bird-friendly lighting and design options are…

Rachel Carson found inspiration in the work of 19th-century writer Richard Jefferies, whose work helped Carson develop her deep sense of connection with the natural world. Jefferies wrote: "Consider the grasses and the oaks, the swallows, the sweet blue butterfly — they are one and all a…

Across Central and South America, conservationists, teachers, and researchers are benefiting from groups like Birder’s Exchange, a program of the American Birding Association. The program collects new and used binoculars, scopes, books, and tripods, and passes them on to people working to…

Barred Owls are very territorial, and they don't migrate. Solitary calls from a male in early spring probably mean that he has not attracted a mate. In May and June, he continues to hoot, though less frequently. By summer, breeding season has passed. Maybe this solitary Barred Owl is what…

Gordon Hempton, the Sound Tracker, seeks those rare places untouched by human noise, where birds and nature create a complex, quiet music. In the Hoh Valley, in a rain forest in Olympic National Park, is a place he calls One Square Inch of Silence. It’s the least noise-polluted place in…

Over a century ago, a Nebraska man, an audiologist named Solon Towne, “collected” the songs of meadowlarks. He’d saunter about his farm, listening. Then he’d hurry back to his desk to transcribe the birds’ songs into musical notes. To help him remember the songs, he added words. One…

Off the coast of North Carolina, at the edge of North America’s continental shelf, the seafloor drops more than 12,000 feet. Seabird researcher Tom Johnson says the nutrient-rich waters of this area nurture a wealth of squid and small fish, attracting seabirds such as these Wilson’s Storm…

We may be more indebted to birds than we know. Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton explains: “I was curious about the human range of sound . . . it’s a perfect match for bird song,” he says. “If we hear bird song, then we’re also listening to an area that has food, water, and an extended…