Image: The Ultimate Bird Drawing Throwdown Showdown Graphic featuring images of David Sibley and H. Jon Benjamin

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Illustrator David Sibley and actor H. Jon Benjamin will face off in the bird illustration battle of the century during BirdNote's Year-end Celebration and Auction!

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Shows With Contributions by Conor Gearin

Episode promotional graphic for Bring Birds Back: "Birding On The Hill" featuring the podcast artwork and headshot of guest, Tykee James

Birding on the Hill

So many of the challenges facing birds are systemic, bigger than what any one person can fix — so how do we get governments to step in and do something? Tykee James, a Sr. Government Relations Representative for The Wilderness Society, has approached this issue in a creative way: by…
A bird with a white throat, grey head, and light brown wings peeks out at the viewer. It's beak is yellow and black.

An Inclusive Approach to Bird-a-Thon

Bird-a-thon is Massachusetts Audubon’s biggest fundraiser. Teams of birders spend 24 hours competing to observe as many bird species as they can, to encourage people to donate. But Meghadeepa Maity, who helped organize Bird-a-thon in 2021, realized that not everyone can spend all day…
A small gray bird with its back to the viewer. A tuft of feathers can be seen on its head.

BirdNoir - The Hair Bandit

In this episode of BirdNoir, the P.I. gets a call from someone desperate over a bird stealing a tuft of her precious Pomeranian’s fur. The detective is able to ID the thief, a bird with so light a touch that it can take fur from a snoozing dog without waking it. The motive: nice, warm…
Female American Redstart bird is leaning forward while on a stout branch, holding her tail up high. She displays her light brown back with darker brown wing, lemon yellow on breast, and her tail has both yellow and dark brown on the feathers.

Including Female Birds in Conservation Plans

For many species of birds, scientists know more about the males than the females. And that’s a problem when making a conservation plan for a species that maps out which habitats to protect. Joanna Wu, a PhD student at UCLA, says that in some species of warblers, males and females live in…
A Sharp-shinned Hawk with its dark red eyes, dark wings, and patterned white and reddish brown chest and belly stands on branches of holly tree. The background is soft out of focus light brown.

A Book for Beginning Birders

After countless birding adventures of her own, Sharon Stiteler — who’s also known as Birdchick — decided to write a book that could serve as a fun introduction for beginning birders. Sharon compares the size and shape of each bird species in the book to everyday objects as a memory aid…
The episode artwork for Threatened: "Hope for the ‘Ua‘u"

Hope for the ‘Ua‘u

We end our season with a little seabird that’s making a comeback. The Hawaiian Petrel, or ‘Ua’u, was once written off as going or gone from the islands. But after recent discoveries of remnant colonies, we see how some human intervention with the right tools can make a huge difference for…
The Threatened episode artwork for "Saving the ʻAlalā"

Saving the ʻAlalā

Hawai‘i has its own species of crow, the clever and charismatic ʻAlalā. But the species hasn’t been able to survive in its shrinking native habitat. The only reason the ʻAlalā still exists is because of captive breeding programs. Reintroducing them to the wild is fraught with challenges…
A male Northern Cardinal sits on a leafy branch, his vivid red plumage and yellow beak highlighted by sunlight

Black Botanists Week

In 2020, the first Black Birders Week celebrated the contributions of Black birders and called for greater inclusivity in the outdoors. Later that summer, the first Black Botanists Week premiered. Georgia Silvera Seamans, an urban forester, helped organize the event. Now in its third year…
A Roseate Tern standing on a a sunlit shoreline

A Tiny Island Full of Terns

The Northeast population of Roseate Terns is endangered. Each summer, roughly twenty-five hundred Roseate Terns are found on Ram Island, a 2.5-acre island off the coast of Massachusetts. In the 1960s and 70s, gull numbers surged. Gulls drove terns off of Ram Island, until biologists began…
Oriental Magpie-Robin displaying his navy blue head, chest, and wings, with white underparts and white stripe on the wing.

Spark Bird: Meghadeepa Maity

Meghadeepa Maity grew up in India on the outskirts of a city that still had pockets of green space here and there, like their family’s garden. They started noticing one bird species in particular that flocked to the garden. With their sister, Meghadeepa searched the web and learned the…