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

Join BirdNote tomorrow, November 30th!

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 Ariana Remmel

BirdNote narrator Michael Stein speaks before a microphone in a recording studio.

Behind the Scenes

It takes a lot to bring you the rich sounds of birds yodeling, cooing, and screeching to you each day. It's a meticulous process of researching, writing, fact-checking, editing, recording and sound design. That’s all done by our in-house production team! BirdNote is a non-profit…
A small grey and buff bird with black "cap" coloring on its white head

Join the Flock

Songbirds in winter flocks benefit from having other birds nearby. They can recognize warning signals from other species and follow them to sources of food. We think of BirdNote’s audience as our flock, and we’re much stronger together than as individuals. But every single member of the…
Light brownish-red bird with its back to viewer, looking to its right

Migrations: Veeries Predict Hurricanes

In some years, tawny-colored thrushes called Veeries cut their breeding season short. Researchers discovered that Veeries tend to stop breeding early in the same years that the Atlantic hurricane season is particularly severe. Surprisingly, Veeries are sometimes better at predicting…
Light brownish-red bird with its back to viewer, looking to its right

Migrations: Veeries Predict Hurricanes

In some years, tawny-colored thrushes called Veeries cut their breeding season short. Researchers discovered that Veeries tend to stop breeding early in the same years that the Atlantic hurricane season is particularly severe. Surprisingly, Veeries are sometimes better at predicting…
Flocks of Snow Geese, some sitting on a body of water, some in flight, with mountains and cloudy sky in the background

Using Machine Learning to Forecast Bird Migration

PhD student Mikko Jimenez and his colleagues are using machine learning to improve our ability to forecast bird migration. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that can find patterns in huge amounts of data much faster than a person can, and then use those patterns to make…
Yellow-eyed Junco standing on a rock, displaying right profile showing grey head, brownish back and wings, and bright yellow eye.

Altitudinal Migration

Yellow-eyed Juncos sometimes make a migration of sorts — not from north to south, but from the high mountains to the lowlands or the other way around. It’s called altitudinal migration. In the warm summer months, some Yellow-eyed Juncos prefer to nest at higher elevations, while in winter…
A male Great Frigatebird rests atop branches, sunlight on his dark plumage, bright red throat, and long hooked beak.

Millicent Ficken Studied How Birds Play

Millicent Ficken spent her career studying bird behavior and communication. The first woman to earn a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell in 1960, Ficken authored over 100 scientific papers. She discovered that male hummingbirds have a whole repertoire of songs rather than…
A male Bufflehead duck floating on still water, with sunlight showing the "rainbow" iridescence look of his head feathers.

Seeing the Rainbow in a Bird’s Feathers

We make it a habit to detail the broad and beautiful spectrum of bird colors, but iridescent feathers are undoubtedly among the most mesmerizing. When sunlight hits the Bufflehead’s dark head feathers at the right angle, their colors transform into shades of the rainbow, from deep violet…
Flock of Bar-tailed Godwits in flight against a clear sky

Migration Takes Guts — Until It Doesn’t

This Bar-tailed Godwit makes one of the longest migrations of any animal — a 7,200-mile non-stop flight each autumn from western Alaska to New Zealand. In his book A World on the Wing, Scott Weidensaul explores the remarkable transformation godwits undergo to make this migration possible…
Flock of Bar-tailed Godwits in flight against a clear sky

Migration Takes Guts — Until It Doesn’t

This Bar-tailed Godwit makes one of the longest migrations of any animal — a 7,200-mile non-stop flight each autumn from western Alaska to New Zealand. In his book A World on the Wing, Scott Weidensaul explores the remarkable transformation godwits undergo to make this migration possible…