The goal is to attract birds to your aviary by collecting things they like to eat. Your birds are worth points, and they score you more points when they lay eggs, gather food, or do other bird-y things. As you study your birds’ powers and strategize your next move, you’re getting a stealth…

The board game Wingspan came out this year to a lot of buzz. It’s been pretty much continuously sold out or backordered since orders opened in January. It won the Kennerspiel des Jahres, German for “Connoisseur's Game of the Year” — the board game-equivalent of winning best picture at the…

When he was just a kid, Gordon Orians kept notebooks about the birds he saw. And then he realized he could make discoveries – he could add to the body of knowledge and contribute to science. That opened a whole new world to him, and he has spent the rest of his life studying birds and the…

Sound recordist Gordon Hempton thinks our thoughts and our actions echo the place we’re in. So if we’re in a noisy city, we’ll be noisy ourselves. But, Gordon says, “When we go to a place that is nature at its most natural, I think we find ourselves being who we are.” Today, we're on the…

Visit a completely undisturbed ecosystem, where all the creatures we hear are all native to the land, and have coexisted and continued to evolve together for thousands of years. No animal is stepping on the communications of another animal. No two birds sound alike. It’s the final episode…

Today we’re visiting the Zabalo River in Ecuador. It’s a completely undisturbed ecosystem, where all the creatures we hear are all native to the land, and have coexisted and continued to evolve together for thousands of years. No animal is stepping on the communications of another animal…

A great place to listen to insects - and birds - is a remote mountain lake in the spring. Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, recorded the sounds of this lake in Washington’s Methow Valley. The air is so clear of noise you’ll actually be able to hear the tiny splashes of lake trout…

If you’re at a cold mountain lake at just the right time and the air above it is warmer, then you might hear something magical. Because sound travels faster through warm layers than through cold ones, the lake can turn into a giant funnelling microphone. Hear it for yourself at BirdNote…

A great place to listen to insects — and birds — is a remote mountain lake in the spring. The surrounding mountians and properties of the cold water make these lakes some of nature's great concert halls. Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist and sonic guide for the this series, recorded…

When he was just 22 years old, a young man named Samuel Clemens (who would go on to become the writer Mark Twain) signed on to train as a pilot on a Mississippi riverboat. He quickly realized that, if he volunteered for the early morning shift he could experience one of the most incredible…