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New Zealand Bellbird
A forest in New Zealand rings with the sound of bellbirds, also known as Korimako or Makomako. Many bellbirds sing together, especially in the mornin…
9 months ago
Wild Goose Dacha
No human dreams of relaxing on the shores of Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean that’s best known as a Soviet testing site for nuclear…
9 months, 1 week ago
The Value of a Dust Bath
It might sound strange, but dirt helps birds scrub themselves clean. Birds of all sizes, like the Eurasian Skylark, often scrape a depression in the …
9 months, 1 week ago
Ancient Birds Nested in the Arctic, Too
Every summer, millions of birds flock to the Arctic Circle to find mates and raise their young. In a study published in 2025, paleontologists found e…
9 months, 1 week ago
Female Birds Sing in the Tropics
In temperate climates like North America, it’s often male songbirds that sing the most. Typically the males migrate north before females and establis…
9 months, 1 week ago
Preening 101
If a bird’s feathers get too dried out, they become brittle. To prevent that from happening, most birds have a gland located above the base of the ta…
9 months, 1 week ago
The Heart of a Bird
Birds’ four-chambered hearts run larger than those of mammals, relative to body size, and they are coupled with extremely efficient cardiovascular sy…
9 months, 1 week ago
Magnificent Frigatebird Drum Roll
Magnificent Frigatebirds are huge, gangly seabirds found around the warm waters of the Western Hemisphere. When it comes time to mate, males inflate …
9 months, 1 week ago
‘Ākohekohe
Sporting a fancy tuft of feathers on its forehead and a bright orange nape, Maui island’s ‘ākohekohe is one Hawaiʻi’s strikingly beautiful native for…
9 months, 2 weeks ago
Letter to a Pileated Woodpecker
In this episode, ornithologist J. Drew Lanham reads a letter he has written to a Pileated Woodpecker, a large species of woodpecker that is sometimes…
9 months, 2 weeks ago