With up to nine-foot wingspans, Trumpeter Swans are the world's largest water birds. Watching them in flight brings us into the presence of what the poet Rilke called "a more powerful reality - rising and circling, poised but wild." But they came close to disappearing. Through the love…

Aaron Gyllenhaal is only 16 years old, but he can identify more than 1,000 species of birds! In October 2013, Aaron set a new record, having observed more than 276 species in a single year in Cook County, Illinois. Such an accomplishment requires perseverance. Finding a Lapland Longspur…

“There’s no place in the world that’s had more bird extinctions since human settlement than the Hawaiian Islands,” says Dr. George Wallace of American Bird Conservancy. Of the 42 native bird species that remain, nearly three-quarters are endangered. But there is hope: Thanks to habitat…

August, 2014 - GOOD NEWS! Thanks to American Bird Conservancy and others, Reckitt Benckiser has agreed to pull 12 d-CON products off the market! Check the transcript to learn of alternatives for dealing with pests. When birds of prey die from rodenticides, it’s a double whammy, because…

While many in the US are out counting birds for the annual Christmas Bird Count, our friends in Latin America are doing the same. At Costa Rica’s La Selva Research Station, they’re counting resident tropical birds and those that have migrated south for the winter, like this Baltimore…

For shorebirds like Bar-tailed Godwits, Black-bellied Plovers, and Dunlin, mud matters. Few mudflats are more important than those of the Yellow Sea along the coast of China, and North and South Korea, where more than 70 species of shorebirds rest and feed. For several species of…

How do new kinds of birds and animals arise in the world? How does nature proceed from having a single species to having two different species? To find out, Dr. Mike Webster of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is studying Red-backed Fairywrens in Australia. These birds, like the male…

Picture yourself holding a tiny, Black-capped Chickadee like this one. Or a big, blue Steller’s Jay! Volunteer Mark Purcell did just that while learning to net and band birds with the Puget Sound Bird Observatory. “It’s thrilling to see a bird that close,” he says. “You have complete…

BirdNote guest, Father Tom Pincelli (also known as Father Bird), comes to us from the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas, one of the premier birding spots in this country. He was born and raised in Connecticut, but now calls Texas home. This Great Kiskadee is a typical bird of that area. The…

In 1977, Stephen Kress used a creative approach to reintroduce Atlantic Puffins to Eastern Egg Rock, an island in Maine’s Muscongus Bay: decoys! It had been 100 years since these charismatic birds had inhabited the island. Today, thanks to the continuing work by Dr. Kress and Project…