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Birds in Focus

Birds in Focus: The Conservation of Experience

For more than a quarter-century, the dawn and the trees have hardly changed at Bear Swamp. Each June for the past 27 years, which is nearly half my life, I’ve bushwhacked the same route…


Birds in Focus: The Vireo Challenge

Some weighty and persistent questions in the North Woods: Black spruce or red spruce? Green frog or mink frog? Red-eyed vireo or blue-headed vireo? Not that the two vireos look alike. What…

Birds in Focus: Drumroll, Please

Trees speak many languages, their leaves whooshing in summer and trunks creaking in winter. At the onset of spring, trees become sounding boards for courtship. Before the thrushes and warblers…

Birds in Focus: The Two Kinglets - Not Quite Birds of a Feather

In frigid woods this winter, find yourself a glint of springtime – a spark from the head of a golden crowned kinglet. Smaller than a chickadee but seemingly greater in kinetic energy,…

Birds in Focus: Canada Geese

The Canada geese now honking overhead in V-formation, perhaps more than any other birds, exemplify the fall migration. Except when they’re not really migrating, and except when…

Birds in Focus: Birds on the Defensive

As a birder for nearly 60 years, I’ve managed to enrage a few nesting birds. Arctic terns in New Brunswick once drew blood from my scalp. Canada geese in Ohio charged and hissed at me.…

Birds in Focus: Spring Creepers

Pity the brown creeper. A prisoner of the forest, the creeper seems unable to escape the gravitational pull of the tree trunk on which it creeps, ever upward, gleaning insects, spiders, and…

Birds in Focus: A Cross to Bear (on the Bill)

Even among the quirky cast of characters we know as birds, the crossbill is a bit of a freak. It’s hard to decide which is more bizarre: its bill or its breeding behavior. Front and…

Common Nighthawks: Two Strikes and a Temporal Mismatch

On a warm August evening at Boston’s Fenway Park, everything had fallen into place by the fifth inning: The Red Sox were beating the Angels 6-0. My pals and I in right field were…

Birds in Focus: Finding Refuge in Reference Birds

Pop quiz: Describe a blue jay. Blue with a crest? Okay, but where exactly is the blue on a blue jay? What’s white on a blue jay? What’s black on a blue jay? And what’s…

Birds in Focus: A Bobolink’s Carbon Fingerprint

Life can be rough for the bobolink, a charismatic grassland bird whose population is declining. Halting that decline is a challenge for North American ornithologists. After all, bobolinks…

Birds in Focus: Fusion Foods

On a crisp, sunny day in September, at the end of what was probably a typical summer for a dragonfly (lots of flying around, killing things, and mating beside a pond), a common green darner…

Birds in Focus: The Rockin’ Robin

From his perch high on a balsam fir near a bog in northern Vermont, far from suburbia and barnyards, an American robin sings as if he owns the place. And, in many ways, he does. Although…

Birds in Focus: Pawning off Parenting

Even devoted birdwatchers find it tough to love the brown-headed cowbird. Black body. Fat head. Grating voice. And the female is a homely gray. Not exactly a glamor couple. But appearance is…

Birds in Focus: Repro-duck-tion

For all the time we spend watching birds during the breeding season, rarely do we get to see birds actually breeding. That’s because avian copulation usually lasts only seconds. Birds…

The Winter Warbler

It is an aster in winter, sun through the clouds – a force of nature called the yellow-rumped warbler. Find its buttery warmth even when life outside seems to groan or crunch or crack…

Hawkwatching Confidential

Pack a lunch, climb a mountain, and witness thousands of hawks gliding south over hills blazing with fall foliage. If only this romanticized rite of autumn were so easy. If only migrating…

Sex and the Single Bird

Blackbirds do it. Chickadees do it. Even educated emus do it. Some birds are cheaters. Their trysts, dalliances, one-morning stands, and other infidelities would constitute a racy script for…

Misfit Migrants

Pick your favorite sign of spring: squirrels mating, mud oozing, maples flowering. Mine is a vulture soaring. Change in the air is a naked, ruddy head gliding in on big wings. But more than…

Birds in Focus: Harlequin Romance and Other Winter Fantasies

In winter at Halibut Point, a rocky headland on the Massachusetts coast, the drama begins at dawn. A stout gust rips the white from whitecaps and sprays the shore with ice that tinkles like…