Author: Frances Monroe

A farming community experiences a specific type of tension when it perceives policy from above as a threat. It doesn’t always come with a lot of noise. Sometimes it can be seen in the deliberate phrasing a village leader uses when talking about the provincial governor, or in the way an elderly farmer pauses before responding to a question. Since Governor Matthew Marcos Manotoc started advocating for a more aggressive conservation agenda for the province’s wetland areas—one that includes wildlife monitoring, forest protection, and an ecotourism partnership framework modeled partially on Singapore’s renowned NParks system—tension in Ilocos Norte has been…

“In focus” meant that the object you were pointing at was sharp for the majority of photography’s history. It’s fairly easy. To find the closest bright edge, a photographer could either manually adjust the lens or rely on a simple contrast-detection system. That was all. Even fifteen years ago, it would have seemed absurd to think that a camera could recognize a bird’s eye in midair and maintain its sharpness while wings blur and branches cut across the frame. It no longer sounds absurd. More intriguing than a spec sheet upgrade is what has occurred over the last few years,…

Observing a warbler arrive to discover the leaves already full and the insects past their prime has an almost melancholic quality. It doesn’t appear dramatic. The bird lands, takes a nap, and looks around. However, beneath that serene scene is a slow-motion unraveling that ornithologists have been monitoring for years with increasing concern. Spring is coming sooner rather than later. There is no longer any debate about that. It’s more difficult to explain why that matters to birds in particular and why the repercussions may be more dire than the headlines typically indicate. Birds that migrate schedule their travels around…

Today, if you stroll along a section of the California coastline, you may notice something that doesn’t feel right before you can identify it. The cliffs are not as noisy as they ought to be. It appears that the water is calm. However, if you follow the tideline long enough, you’ll find them—loons, grebes, and pelicans—lying on the sand with their bodies unharmed and their feathers intact. In a storm, they didn’t wash up. They just went hungry. Scientists claim that this prolonged marine heatwave, which has been off the West Coast for more than a year, is one of…

The fact that there are currently more songbirds in cages than in the wild on the island of Java is a startling discovery made by conservationists. Not a little bit more. Much more. The natural order has completely been upset by decades of poaching, which has been accelerated by digital black markets and a cultural fixation with singing competitions. The woods are now silent. The infrastructure has changed recently, not the demand, which has existed for generations. In the past, criminal networks relied on word-of-mouth connections, corrupted border agents, and physical markets. The same birds that used to fly through…

Dr. Kimberlie McCue stood under a massive saguaro cactus in Phoenix on a 105-degree afternoon and pointed to a wound in its trunk where one of its arms had broken off and fallen to the ground. The circumstances, according to her, are “far from normal.” Deliberate and restrained, that phrase somehow made it worse. When the truth is too big to bear comfortably, scientists often try to minimize it. The story of those saguaros—thirteen arms lost in one summer at the Desert Botanical Garden, which has maintained records since 1939—is the kind that makes headlines for a short while before…

On the dashboard was the battered paperback field guide, its spine cracked from years of use, its range maps softened by handling and the sun. That little book was the gold standard for generations of birdwatchers: turn to the appropriate page, match the illustration, verify the range, and you’re done. Either the bird belonged here or it didn’t. It felt good to be certain. It also feels more and more like a memory. In the field, something has changed. Not figuratively, but literally in the fields, wetlands, and treelines where early-morning birdwatchers set up their scopes. The Great Lakes are…

The Sonoran Desert has a unique quality in the early morning, with the saguaros standing like sentinels against a lightning sky and the air still carrying a hint of coolness from the previous night. It’s the kind of terrain that seems established, old, and well-defined. Researchers weren’t exactly shocked when University of Arizona ecologists started recording cactus wrens constructing nests inside the structural frames of utility-scale solar arrays. It was more akin to cautious fascination. The official state bird of Arizona, the cactus wren, is not a delicate animal. It is loud, scrappy, and incredibly careful about where it builds.…

A photograph stops people cold every October inside the Natural History Museum in London. A brown hyena, an animal that hardly anyone ever sees, stood in the dusty light and crumbling walls of a Namibian diamond mining ghost town last year. Wim van den Heever, a photographer from South Africa, had spent ten years looking through that abandoned settlement. After ten years of tracking and scraping evidence, the animal itself was never found. The whole obsession suddenly made sense when the camera trap caught it one evening. This world is like that. It runs on a schedule that most people…

The skies over Utah start to fill every spring. Eared grebes, Wilson’s phalaropes, American avocets, and egrets are among the seemingly unbelievable numbers of birds that pour in from the Arctic tundra and the tip of South America, navigating through desert air and mountain corridors to reach a single destination. The Great Salt Lake. For millions of them, it is the only meaningful stop on a cross-continental journey. Every year, more than 330 species and over 12 million birds fly over the lake. Some stay for weeks, eating nonstop and gaining twice as much weight before continuing. In this lake,…