Today kicks off Coral Reef Awareness Week. Coral reefs are hotspots of biodiversity, but they’re threatened by warming ocean temperatures, pollution, and overfishing. One thing to be aware of this week is how these underwater ecosystems are linked to birds in the skies above them. And…

Eagle Cliff in New Hampshire’s Franconia Notch State Park is an important nesting site for Peregrine Falcons. Each year, popular climbing routes in the area close temporarily to give nesting falcons their space. After peregrines disappeared from the northeast due to the pesticide DDT…

If you’re new to birding, you might be baffled by names like Couch’s Kingbird, Wilson’s Warbler, and Townsend’s Solitaire. These birds were named in honor of scientists and their friends long ago. But the result is a long list of birds named after white men, many of whom took part in…

Evolution on islands can produce unusually large species. Haast’s Eagle lived on the islands now known as New Zealand. With a wingspan of 9 feet and weighing up to 30 pounds, the eagle hunted the moa — a flightless bird that stood over ten feet tall. The eagles probably vanished not long…

In grasslands of the central U.S., birds called Dickcissels sing a quirky song that “spells out” the syllables of their name. Dickcissels are approachable birds, often chirping away while a person walks nearby. But they’re also masters of concealment, hiding their nests from predators in…

At midday, it might seem like the birds that were so active in the morning have gone silent, maybe even vanished. But cormorants rally in the afternoon, offering a second chance to see and hear them. During the breeding season, Double-crested Cormorants have two peaks of fishing activity…

The crocodilians — crocodiles and their relatives, like the American Alligator — are the closest living relatives of birds. About 250 million years ago, the ancestors of all crocodiles split off from the dinosaur group that gave rise to modern birds. While crocs these days are mostly short…

Organized by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and by Birds Canada, volunteers for Project NestWatch observe local nesting birds and track whether they’re successful in raising their young. Because the nest-watching volunteers monitor birds over a huge area, they cover way more ground than a…

If you’ve already done things around the home with birds in mind, consider one more action that might be less obvious. Turning the thermostat down a degree or two in the colder months and up a degree in the warmer months might seem more about personal preference or energy bills than birds…

In the spring, Rufous Hummingbirds journey from Mexico to the northwest U.S., some as far north as Alaska! That’s almost 1,000 miles one way for a bird measuring just under four inches beak to tail, making this the longest migration of any bird relative to body length. Not long after…