Author: Frances Monroe

In Orkney, there is a particular type of morning when you don’t anticipate seeing anything unusual: flat grey light, salt on the wind, and the bog stretching out like a wrinkled blanket. Nevertheless, someone did in 2019. A butterfly with commas. Ember and cinder-colored wings with ragged edges and enough delicacy to look like an error. One tiny insect, out of its proper place. It didn’t make headlines around the world. However, it was quietly significant to those who keep a close eye on these things. Animals that appear outside of their typical range are referred to as “vagrant.” It…

In the Midwest of the United States, if a farmer discovers even one sick bird in a poultry house, the entire flock is immediately and brutally culled. Not only the ill bird. Each and every one. It’s the kind of loss that is difficult to quantify in a spreadsheet: hundreds of thousands of birds, years of hard work, destroyed in a matter of hours. More times than most people realize, H5N1 avian influenza has forced this result on American producers in recent years, subtly raising the cost of eggs and chicken at the grocery store while the general public is…

Observing a political dispute over land management while one of the world’s rarest birds fights to survive the summer somewhere along the Texas Gulf Coast seems almost surreal. The whooping crane is not a voter. It doesn’t advocate. It simply needs the wetlands that it has always required, the same wetlands that are currently at the heart of a growing conflict over who has the authority to decide what happens to American land. The recently proposed No Federal Expansion Designation in West Texas Act by Senator Ted Cruz appears to be a property rights legislation. Cruz put it simply: Texans,…

Millions of birds take a desperate risk every autumn somewhere above the well-kept hedges and colorful flower beds of suburban America. They are riding thermals over highways and shopping malls, burning through fat reserves, and navigating by stars, all while looking for one thing: enough food to keep going. Even in well-meaning yards, what they discover is essentially useless. It has an almost paradoxical quality. Even with an abundant appearance—roses climbing trellises, ornamental grasses swaying, imported shrubs bearing waxy berries—a garden can serve as a mid-migration bird’s nutritional desert. Lack of greenery is not the issue. It’s the wrong kind…

The way this issue develops is almost ridiculous. In Cardiff, a dog owner routinely applies a tiny liquid applicator to the back of her pet’s neck for about thirty seconds. A few weeks later, scientists are collecting water samples from a local river and discovering pesticide concentrations high enough to endanger aquatic life. There is a tiny, imperceptible chain that links those two moments, and very few people are aware of it. In the UK and throughout much of the world, treating fleas and ticks has become a common practice for pet owners. An estimated 23 million cats and dogs…

Field rangers in the Phongolo Nature Reserve in South Africa started discovering dead birds on the ground in late 2020. The temperature had risen above 45 degrees Celsius, which is about ten degrees higher than the worst temperatures the area typically experiences. Small species like the blue waxbill, a delicate finch with a powder-blue face that forages in grass in small, agitated flocks, were among the birds most impacted. Nearly half of the carcasses found by rangers searching a portion of the reserve after the heat broke were blue waxbills. It would be simple to interpret that as a singular…

A big bird moves silently through the branches deep in the southern Philippines’ forests, where the canopy is thick enough to block out daylight. It doesn’t make many calls. It doesn’t stay in public areas. The world that the Palawan Hornbill and its critically endangered cousin, the Sulu Hornbill, inhabit has been getting smaller for decades due to land conversion, logging, and the gradual degradation of the forest habitats that these birds depend on. The lack of attention this crisis receives outside of birding circles is almost bewildering. Anthracoceros montani, also known as the Sulu Hornbill, is one of the…

There is a specific type of alarm that arises from watching something silently drain away rather than from an unexpected catastrophe. The latest news about the dotterel, a tiny, colorful wading bird with a rusty-orange chest and an almost painted-on white eye stripe, seems to be based on that sentiment. Every year, the dotterel travels from northern Africa to mountainous areas in the United Kingdom for breeding. It spends the summers on rocky plateaus and alpine vegetation before returning south. The Scottish Highlands and the high tops of the Cairngorms have been the scene of those mountain summers for centuries.…

Observing a warbler alter its flight path over an endless expanse of Iowa cornfield is almost unsettling. It doesn’t touch down. It never stops. It simply exerts more force, ascends slightly, and bides its time until the wind cooperates. David Wilcove, an ecologist at Princeton, has spent years attempting to comprehend that slight behavioral change, which is undetectable to anyone not looking at a radar screen. Furthermore, the current data isn’t very comforting. Wilcove, a Princeton University professor of ecology, evolutionary biology, and public affairs, has long maintained that the migratory bird system in North America is subtly collapsing. The…

A local story about thirty-nine backyard birds in a small Philippine town testing positive for a highly pathogenic virus doesn’t last long. That’s essentially what happened when H5N1 avian influenza was discovered in a flock in Capalan, Oriental Mindoro, in early July 2026. Although the number of cases was small, the findings had far-reaching consequences. There is little room for error in a nation where millions of households raise chickens for a living rather than as a pastime. It has always been. The Camarines Sur Breach, as it has come to be known in Philippine veterinary and agricultural circles, wasn’t…