A female Dark-eyed Junco lands on a branch nearby, where you can admire her subtle beauty. The muted colors of her feathers. Her nearly weightless buoyancy. Her quick, bright eyes. Her tidy pink bill. Often in winter, you may see a "Slate-colored" Junco or an "Oregon" Junco. In spring…

A determined dry-land wheat farmer and a visionary baker are trying to help a bird in trouble, the Sharp-tailed Grouse. The farmer, Wade Troutman, leaves 30% of the land he farms in its natural condition. The undisturbed patches of sagebrush habitat provide cover and food for grouse and…

In our autumn, Bar-tailed Godwits fly non-stop for nine days across the Pacific, to reach New Zealand from Alaska. Each spring, the birds make the trip north to breed. But this time, they stop before they reach Alaska, to refuel on the shores of northeast China and the Korean peninsula…

Many owls appear in the Harry Potter films. Harry's owl Hedwig is a two-foot tall Snowy Owl. (Portrayed as a female, it's actually a male - you can tell because it's pure white.) Ron Weasley, Harry's friend, also has an owl, named Pigwidgeon, a Scops Owl. And the evil Draco Malfoy has as…

Many years ago, when rivers began flowing from the mountains to the sea, the animals couldn't agree on their course. Raven wanted the rivers to turn and wind, so that as he flew up and down them, he would have different views at every bend. Mink disagreed. The loud and raucous Raven…

On January 1, 2011, residents of Beebe, Arkansas awoke to find hundreds of Red-winged Blackbirds lying dead on their lawns and in the streets. Birds in a nearby roost had all taken off at 10:15 PM, when fireworks shook the windows of nearby houses. They died by colliding with wires, trees…

Across the country, native prairie occupies only small fragments of its former range. On Washington's Whidbey Island, the Whidbey Camano Land Trust is restoring a remnant prairie. Land Steward Cheryl Lowe explains: "We're planting 23 different species of native prairie plants." As the…

In November 2010, this elegant Fork-tailed Flycatcher, a bird normally found between southern Mexico and Argentina, turned up near Cove Island Park, a multi-use park in Stamford, CT. A few years ago, after Audubon declared a section of the park an Important Bird Area, local citizens worked…

A Northern Spotted Owl hoots from deep within a Northwest forest. We know the Spotted Owl best as an unwitting symbol of an ongoing political and economic struggle. We've seen its dark eyes peering from the pages of a newspaper. A Spotted Owl stands about a foot-and-a-half tall. It's…

At 9,000 feet in the Manzano Range in New Mexico, HawkWatch International counts and bands raptors making their way south along the Rocky Mountain front. Some, like this Swainson's Hawk, fly all the way to the pampas of Argentina.