Author: Frances Monroe

Something amazing is taking place in the treetops deep within the forest corridors of Mindanao, the second-largest island in the Philippines and one of Southeast Asia’s most biologically rich but least researched regions. The birds are singing. They’re not all singing the same song, though. This may seem apparent. Different songs for different species. However, that isn’t exactly what field observers and researchers have been discovering. Birds of the same species are making vocally different calls when they are separated by a river, a ridge, or a few kilometers of dense canopy. Basically, local accents. Additionally, it becomes stranger and…

A bar-tailed godwit is making one of the longest noncontinuous flights in animal history somewhere over the Yellow Sea. It passes through customs, doesn’t have a passport, and doesn’t go through a quarantine checkpoint. But whatever it might be carrying is far more important than anyone following its GPS tag would want to discover. The quiet, unsettling truth at the heart of an expanding corpus of research is that migratory birds connect ecosystems rather than merely crossing borders. Additionally, they connect disease reservoirs in ways that ground-based surveillance and static maps are unable to. For years, scientists and field veterinarians…

When a reaction doesn’t work, there’s a specific type of frustration that arises. This type of frustration doesn’t make a big announcement; instead, it quietly takes hold after the third or fourth attempt fails. That frustration took Payal Joshi, a research chemist who spent her days meticulously following protocols and organizing organic reactions, in an unexpected direction: up to a terrace with a camera, watching birds. It’s difficult to describe what transpired next without coming across as overly metaphorical. However, there have always been instances in science where the solution comes from an unexpected source. Joshi’s interest in bird photography…

When most people see a certain picture for the first time, it stops them cold. The men who stole the massive, motionless dead silverback gorilla were carrying him out of the Congo forest on an improvised stretcher. It resembles a funeral procession. An international agreement to save critically endangered gorillas was signed within three months of that picture going viral. Just one frame. One result that had not been achieved through years of policy papers and reports. This is the peculiar, unique power that raw wildlife photography possesses, and it’s a power that feels more and more threatened at the…

Something extraordinary occurs above our heads every autumn. From Siberian grasslands, European wetlands, and Arctic breeding grounds, billions of birds take off and head south, traversing deserts, threading through mountain passes, briefly stopping on mudflats before continuing on. It is among the planet’s oldest rhythms. Some of those birds may be carrying with them what’s evolving and what’s actually worth paying attention to. It’s not exactly a new worry. For many years, scientists have been aware that migratory birds can serve as carriers of infectious diseases. For years, avian influenza has traveled along flyway corridors. However, the discourse has changed…

Last June, a routine vehicle inspection at a busy border crossing in San Ysidro, California, one of the world’s busiest ports of entry, revealed something that the agents had not anticipated. A cardboard box containing seven live Amazon parrots was placed on a car’s passenger floorboard. The driver, Juandaniel Medina, a 24-year-old Lindsay, California resident, admitted to federal agents that he had paid $700 in cash for the birds. He intended to breed them and possibly resell them. By his telling, it was fairly easy. Federal prosecutors had a different perspective. In just a few weeks, Medina became the third…

The concept of backyard chickens is genuinely appealing. It sounds like a sensible, even healthful project: a small flock, a well-built coop, and fresh eggs in the morning. And it has been precisely that for many. Over the past ten years, backyard chicken farming has steadily expanded from rural homesteads into neighborhoods where the closest tree line may be forty feet from the property fence in American suburbs and small towns. It turns out that most chicken keepers don’t realize how important that proximity is. When discussing backyard flocks, people tend to talk about the birds themselves, the coop’s biosecurity,…

There’s a particular kind of absence that’s harder to explain than a presence. Not the absence of something foreign or complicated. The absence of something you’ve always taken for granted, something that arrived every April without fail, like a clock you never had to wind. For generations of people who grew up in the English countryside, that thing was the call of the cuckoo — two clean, descending notes drifting across fields and hedgerows as reliably as the season itself. That clock has nearly stopped. England has lost roughly 70% of its cuckoo population since 1995, and in the lowland…

During the migration season, David Willard would walk the base of office buildings in Chicago every morning. I’m just looking for birds, nothing dramatic. Most of the dead were tiny migrants who had flown into glass the previous evening, drawn by artificial light that they were unable to fully comprehend. In 1978, he began doing this. He measured every bird by hand. mass, wing length, and lower leg bone. Everything was entered into ledgers. Decades of this, in silence, with no specific theory in mind. One of the more disturbing conclusions in current climate science was eventually revealed by that…

Walking through a forest that should be filled with birdsong and hearing nearly nothing is unsettling. “Silent Forest syndrome” is the term used by researchers to describe this phenomenon, and in some parts of Southeast Asia, silence is no longer a red flag. It’s already a reality. The illegal songbird trade doesn’t have the same impact as wildlife crime, contrary to popular belief. It’s not always rhino horn wrapped in clothes or tusks in shipping containers. On ferries traveling between Indonesian islands, thousands of tiny birds are sometimes crammed into plastic bottles and barely able to breathe. Glue-covered branches are…