A study in 2019 found that North American bird populations had declined by three billion birds in the past 50 years. Tenijah Hamilton, the host of Bring Birds Back podcast, talked to biostatistician Adam C. Smith about how scientists arrived at this shocking number. The hard work of…

In the second installment of Bring Birds Back, host Tenijah Hamilton and Sheridan Alford, co-founder of Black Birders Week, talk about how to celebrate Black people who love birds. Then they get out into the wilds of Georgia in search of, you guessed it, birds. Check out the #ForTheBirds…

This week is the second annual Black Birders Week. It was created in response to an incident in Central Park in New York City, where a Black birder was racially profiled and harassed. The week invites more Black folks to learn about birding, which has historically been very white. Tenijah…

Ojibwe writer Heid E. Erdrich's poem DNA Tribes deals with her identity as a Native American woman and the call of the Red-eyed Vireo, which sounds like someone saying “ Here I am, where are you?” [Hear more poetry by Erdrich and other contemporary writers on our podcast, BirdNote Presents…

In the inaugural episode of Bring Birds Back, host Tenijah Hamilton gets to know biostatistician Dr. Adam Smith, coauthor of the study that found we’ve lost 3 billion birds in North America since 1970, and helps us wrap our heads around that gigantic number. The good news? There are lots…

Many years ago, poet Timothy Steele had a Northern Mockingbird take up residence right outside his bedroom window. And the bird sang day and night. “I love mockingbirds generally,” Steele said, “but in this case, I did wish that this particular fellow would shut up! And I wrote the poem as…

Tig Notaro is known for her acting, writing, and especially her deadpan comedy. Less well known is her love for birds. Watching the film Jurassic Park, she noticed how the dinosaurs were portrayed to move similarly to birds, and it piqued her interest. These days, she has bird feeders…

When writer Wendy S. Walters lived in LA in the early 2000s, she wrote a collection of poems about the city called The Birds of Los Angeles. For one of her poems, she wanted to examine the idea of the Hollywood romance “and the ways in which people think that they're going to be walking…

When Olivia Wang was in college, she did field work with Northern Harriers. She remembers the first time she saw a male doing a courtship display known as sky dancing: “It's just all these aerial acrobatics and loops and dives. And it was just… breathtaking to watch — and it still is every…

When illustrator Diana Sudyka was in second grade, she was given a Peterson’s Bird Field Guide. She still remembers making her first bird ID — a Brown-headed Cowbird. Even years later, Sudyka’s love of birds has stuck with her. She recently illustrated the children’s book, How to Find a…