A pigeon pacing up and down anxiously in Central Park sees his friend hop up on the curb. "Where have you been? I've been waiting for hours!" The new arrival says, "It was such a nice day, I decided to walk!" This laugh track also includes gulls, ducks, and chickens. Email us your own bird…

Point Reyes Bird Observatory -- now known as Point Blue Conservation Science -- works to understand how healthy ecosystems function and to reduce the harmful effects of climate change. For example, in the Farallon Islands (pictured here courtesy of Marty Knapp), scientists recorded…

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…

For 30 years, Robert Otto (pictured here) has been putting up nest boxes for bluebirds near his home in northern Michigan. A retired mechanical engineer, Robert has designed and built nest boxes that are easy to maintain and make it simple to check for eggs and fledglings. There are now…

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…

The song of a Western Meadowlark rings out across the eastern slope of Washington’s Cascade Mountains. Come Memorial Day weekend, members of Audubon and friends will celebrate 50 years of gathering at the Wenas Campground to welcome the birds and wildflowers of spring. Two hundred and…

The crisp song of a cardinal . . . the goofy call of a Willow Ptarmigan . . . You can hear these recordings and 150,000 others when you log on to the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The bird sounds you hear on BirdNote come from this library. Linda Macaulay, after whom…

In spring, raptors like this Ferruginous Hawk and hundreds of other bird species migrate north along the front range of the Rocky Mountains. Some songbirds, such as the Bullock’s Oriole, stop to nest along the Cache La Poudre River as it flows through Fort Collins, Colorado. On May 11…

Since 1995, biologist Dan Varland, Executive Director of Coastal Raptors, has been monitoring the health of raptors on the Washington coast, where Peregrine Falcons stoop on shorebirds feeding along the tideline. He’s looking for mercury and DDT in the birds’ blood systems. Though it has…